Microsoft executive Andre Vrignaud must fancy himself a modern-day Nostradamus, because he has made an extensive prediction about Sony’s future. More specifically, he has predicted that the PS3 will be getting another, low-end SKU no later than Thanksgiving of this year (good old Black Friday shopping).
He says:
"The old 60 GB SKU is being cleared out for $499 as quickly as possible – as you might recall, this was the supposed "price cut" that Sony announced. In reality, once supplies are gone in the next couple of months it’ll be gone forever. However, that doesn’t leave Sony in a good place. A single, $599 SKU would be untenable; if they don’t move significant hardware this holiday they’ll basically be dead for this generation.
My prediction is that you’re going to see the creation of a new, low-end SKU this holiday. It’ll likely remove integrated WiFi, memory card reader, and most controversially, all backward compatibility. (Remember, there’s still some back-compat hardware in even the new "software only" back compat SKUs; removing the remaining CPU is a significant cost savings.) You’ll see a new WiFi dongle made available. And finally, this low-end SKU will likely come with a smaller 40 GB hard drive. The low-end price will be set at $399, with the higher-end 80 GB SKU dropping to $499.
So there you go – nothing magic about the current value SKU. It’s just a classic retail technique of clearing the channel for new SKUs. Now we just need to wait a few months for the announcement – it’ll have to be before Thanksgiving, so I’d expect October."
These predictions don’t sound too far-fetched to me. What do you guys think?
