Yes and no. Most of the cost-reductions in hardware manufacturing lifecycles come from minimizing materials loss and optimizing design efficiency. The components don’t actually just get cheaper to produce over time on their own, from a material perspective. That means that material shortages are much more likely to have a big impact on cost than new manufacturing technology, for the same chip.
There’s about a zero percent chance that 5 year old console components cost more today than they did 5 years ago.
Things like that don’t get more expensive, they get cheaper as new tech develops.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
TehPers@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
When you tariff them by over 100% of their value, they tend to cost more to import.
My whole comment was on the tariffs specifically, and there is a 100% chance they affect sales in the US. Even with cost reductions in manufacturing over the total lifetime of the console, there’s no chance they cut costs enough to keep up with the tariffs, and there is no chance they planned for the tariffs to be this high in their planning.
Outside the US? These tariffs aren’t applied, but raising the prices globally limits the impact of them on one of their largest markets since they can amortize the cost across all their markets instead of just one.