Games Thirst – Amazing Life
The Xbox One is $100 more expensive than PS4, but it’s not because Microsoft is seeking to make huge profits on gamers directly on hardware. The reason Xbox One will set you back $500 is because that’s how much it cost Microsoft to make a single unit.
According to the hardware summary from research firm IHS (as cited by AllThingsD), he total cost of parts and manufacturing for Microsoft’s next-gen console comes to about $471, while Sony’s machine only cost about $381.
The report notes that “at least $75″ of the $471 for the Xbox One comes from the Kinect camera that comes packaged with every system. The most expensive item was the Xbox One’s AMD chip, which goes for around $110; the PS4′s AMD chip costs about $100. IHS analyst Andrew Rassweiler said that both chips are “very powerful” and “you might call them a gaming console on a chip.” As for memory, the Xbox One’s DDR3 memory chips stem from SK Hynix and cost around $60, which is $28 less than the PS4′s higher-end GDDR5 memory chips.
Xbox One also has an external power supply which costs around $25 to produce, so the final price of $499 at retail for Microsoft’s latest machine is just about right. But was the extra cost for Kinect worth it? To me personally the answer is no. I think it’d make more sense if Microsoft had spent that extra cash on horsepower, but with Redmond wanting the Xbox One to be a jack of all trades, compromises had to be made.
So a jack of all trades it is, then, coming in at a premium price. But is Xbox One a master of any of the skills it boasts?
