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Sony's $599 PlayStation 3 Lost $3.3 Billion and Still Won the Blu-ray Format War...
On November 11, 2006, two decades ago today, the PlayStation 3 went on sale in Japan with about 100,000 units that EDN wrote immediately flew off store shelves, six days ahead of 400,000 machines for the U.S. launch. Ars Technica had called the E3 price announcement a bomb: $499 for a 20-gigabyte system and $599 for a 60-gigabyte model with Wi-Fi and a memory card reader.
Wired later cited a Forbes report putting Sony's PS3 losses since launch at $3.3 billion, and the console sat in third place behind Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360.
Still, every PS3 plugged into a living-room TV doubled as a movie player. Wikipedia notes that about 10.5 million consoles had sold worldwide against roughly one million HD DVD players when Toshiba announced on February 19, 2008 that it wouldn't develop or manufacture HD DVD players anymore.
Sony Interactive Entertainment eventually logged more than 87.4 million PS3 units sold before Gematsu covered the end of Japanese production in May 2017.
If you're shopping secondhand and want PlayStation 2 disc support plus Super Audio CD playback, Wikipedia notes original and early CECHExx models are the only consoles with a Super Audio CD player, while CNET noted that revised two-USB 80-gigabyte models dropped PS2 backward compatibility altogether.
If you don't need PS2 discs, skip the older fat units and buy a 2009 Slim, which Wikipedia notes uses a slimmer chassis, lower power draw, and a quieter cooling system.
Sony took a beating on launch-day sticker shock, then won Hollywood's disc war by sneaking a Blu-ray player under millions of TVs.
BBC News noted that the company had already halved its 2006 forecast to two million consoles because factories couldn't mass-produce enough blue laser diodes for the Blu-ray drive.
That drive was the whole bet, and it wasn't cheap. The Guardian, citing iSuppli's teardown, put parts and manufacturing alone at $840.35 for the $599 unit and $805.85 for the $499 version.