Betting the farm: Xbox 360 costs $715 to build?
This can be filed under "D"
for dubious, but according to Ala Shiban on HardwareHell the Xbox 360 costs far more than the previously believed $525. Receiving his info from a "high ranking friend at IBM... that worked on the Xbox 360 chip design"
Shiban claims he was told each system cost approximately $715 to manufacture. If true, that's a loss of over $300 per console. On the other hand, the source of the news is questionable: a "friend" who worked on the chip design?
How would he know how much Microsoft is spending on all the other elements that comprise a video game console? What about the GPU, the memory, the DVD drives, the hard drive, the chipset, the controllers, the assembly, packaging,
marketing, and shipping of each console?