Sony Readying for Larger HDD PS3 ?

Bloomberg reports that Sony may be considering a new SKU for the PS3 with a larger hard drive. This follows closely on the heels of the announcement of the Xbox 360 Elite and the 120 gig Xbox HD. No other details are provided, in a story primarily about news of increased profits as PS3 sales continue to rise. " Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer targets an operating profit margin of 5 percent by March 2008, about double the current margin. Tokyo-based Sony confirmed today that it will only sell a more expensive version of its PlayStation 3 game console in North America, a strategy it adopted for the European market to bolster margins. 'Profit margin will probably exceed 5 percent if Sony doesn't lower the price of PlayStation 3,' Hitoshi Kuriyama, an analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. wrote in a report dated yesterday. He rates the stock a buy. Shares of Sony gained 28 percent this year, compared with a 0.8 percent advance in the Nikkei 225 Stock Average."

Enough with the SKU!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with the need to refer to different models as SKU? Do people think it makes them sound hip and informed?

Even the original article doesn't refer to this new model as an SKU. I'm not in the industry, I don't do marketing, and I don't run a store so please stop using the damn term.

How about spending R&D time/money on games?

[coug_]

I'm sorry, but I don't see why Sony is wasting their time on this. The hardware on the PS3 has *never* been the problem. Every complaint about the PS3 has been related to the games themselves and how there isn't really a single "killer app" for the system.

Why?

[FunkyELF]

I thought that the 8 and 10 gig drives in the original xboxes were big.

The fact is that the game studios have had the ability to extend their games add new maps, allow users to create their own race tracks and all that stuff with the xbox but it never happened.

Other than game saves and music for in-game listening, what were these hard drives used for?

I understand people running Linux on their PS3 to do things like web browsing or other casual use. The only people who would really want a bigger hard drive are will figure out how to upgrade their hard drive anyway just like they did on the xbox.

Personally, I think it is kind of a bad idea for Sony to put a hard drive bigger than a Blu Ray disc in their system for pirating reasons. Not that you couldn't mount a network drive and store the movie on another computer anyway.

Re:Enough with the SKU!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"What's with the need to refer to different models as SKU? Do people think it makes them sound hip and informed?"

I'd imagine because it's the right term for it. I suppose they could call it "black box ... oooh shiny!!" so they wouldn't lose you.

Re:Why?

[Volante3192]

The XBox and PS3 hard drives aren't just for saves or new material. You can download demos, videos, even games (Castlevania: SotN takes up a decent chunk of space I believe...) and who knows what else to them.

Thing is, the XBox and PS3 are being marketed not just as video game consoles, but as media centers and as media centers they need to be able to store large amounts of media content. Once you start pulling off HD video content, need for space starts rising.

Is this really news?

[DrXym]

Sony are rumoured to be going to an 80Gb model which is hardly a great leap. Who knows why they have a new model but probably because they're getting the 80Gb drives at the same prices as they used to get the 60Gb models for so they're switching. Perhaps some other OEM is providing the drives. How is that bad for the consumer if you get an extra 20Gb for the same price?

Re:Possible downgrade for the rest of the system..

[amuro98]

What's left to pull?

We know that the PS3 over in Europe already lost its PS2 hardware in favor of a software emulator for PS2 game backwards compatibility. It's only a matter of time before that change shows up in PS3s elsewhere. However, I would think the next things to go would be the useless card reader (really now, does ANYONE plan on using their PS3 as a photo album?) and the WiFi addon. Sony could charge separately for those while still keeping the price of the PS3 the same.

Furthermore, I'm confused by the article's insinuation that Sony could actually *change* the PS3's core specs by removing memory or cache. This isn't a generic PC we're talking about here. Games developed for consoles are very tightly tied to the underlying hardware. This allows them to get better performance because you don't have a full blown OS doing hardware abstraction. At best, such a change to the hardware like this would result in an unacceptable loss of performance in a game, and at worst, might prevent the game from working at all

This isn't even addressing the issue that the PS3 is already arguably starved for RAM, AND has a slower media drive on top of that.