Here’s some math from a comment on Digg:
Let’s see here…Assuming they start today, they have 3 months to meet the launch.
Now, let’s say it takes them 10 days to ship the PS3s everywhere and 5 days to fully
inspect the first generation of PS3s produced…75 days to produce all the PS3…
They have to constantly produce 1 PS3 every 3 seconds in order to have 2 million…Doable? Not sure.
Now, offhand, I don’t recall what number Sony claimed would be available on day one. In fact, I believe they’ve only forecasted for numbers reached by the end of the calendar year. Either way, it would appear that they have their work cut out for them.
I doubt it ships in Europe in 2006.
I doubt it ships in 2006.
I doubt it ships.
jk
Souds like when they say “manufacturing” they’re talking about assembling the final consoles. That doesn’t mean they aren’t stockpiling parts such as Cell CPUs, the RSX and Blu-ray drives.
I think you are going to have a hard time finding any takers for a 600 dollar box of parts. Some assembly required be damned.
Well, screwing all the components together is fairly trivial in the grand sceme of things. It’d be a much bigger deal if there was a hold up in Cell, RSX or XDR production right now.
Does it matter if sony ships 2 or 2 million? They don’t have a decent price at launch, they don’t have decent launch games. Sony is going to want to annouce they sold out everywhere and throwing out several 100 thousand is probably the best way to do it. Sony isn’t stupid. They know this isn’t their holiday season and shipping now is just for mindshare, not marketshare.
There is a hold up on the Cell, isn’t there? I don’t know what any of it means, but something about the ‘yields’ and ‘seven SPEs?’
OEM PS3s? :p
Sony’s promise from E3 was that they would have 2 million units shipped in the “launch window,” 2 million more by the end of calendar year 2006, and 2 million more (total of 6 million) by the end of their fiscal year (end of March 2007).
This was widely reported just about everywhere.
My guess is that now they’re going to say that the “launch window” is to the end of calendar year 2006 and that they’ll have 2 million shipped by then.
Not having started production yet puts them in about the same manufacturing quandry as Microsoft was for the 360, only Microsoft launched a couple weeks later in the year, and didn’t hit Australia and New Zealand until March of this year (Sony says that’s part of their global launch in November).
I don’t know if they can manufacture PS3’s faster than the 360s were, or if there will be component shortages, or how many units will be good through testing, etc. But I would expect bigger shortages than there were with the 360.
Assuming they start full production right when Sept starts, they have 10 weeks to manufacture for launch and ship to Japan, North America, and Europe (considering longer shipping/customs for NA and Europe eats up the 6-day difference in launch date).
To give each of those three major territories only 500,000 units on launch day, they need to produce 150,000 units a week. Tall order for the start of mass production (they’ll ramp up to that after a couple months).
At E3, the PS3 launch date was announced as November 2006. Is it just my imagination, or did Sony push the launch back to Spring 2007 a few weeks or a couple of months ago?
It’s just you.
There is a hold up on the Cell, isn’t there? I don’t know what any of it means, but something about the ‘yields’ and ‘seven SPEs?’
No. There were some horribly misconstrued quotes that had the dumbass fanboy and rumor sites all in a tizzy. But the people who thought it meant PS3 Cell production was going badly just didn’t really understand what they were reading.
Why did I think it had been pushed back? So they have basically three months from today to not only manufacture a million+ PS3s, but distribute them worldwide?
You tell me. Production allways ramps up in the last few months before a launch. Hell, last August MS was just starting to hand out Devkits with final CPUs and GPUs.
I see what you are saying but ‘ramps up’ is one thing, starting is another. Props to them if they can not only push out over a million units in November, but a million high quality units.
Final assembly can be done very quickly as long as they don’t run out of parts. The production problems MS had with the 360 were the result of a shortage in GDDR3 RAM, after all, not an issue with Flextronic’s capacity.