86 SHARES Share Tweet

The numbers suggest that Microsoft is not making much money off the Xbox One either.

Last week, a teardown conducted by research firm IHS revealed that the PlayStation 4 cost $381 to manufacture, with Sony making only $18 in profit off a single unit. Today, the firm has published its Xbox One findings, and the numbers indicate that Microsoft is not faring that much better either. According to IHS, the Xbox One manufacturing cost is at $471, which is $90 more than that of the PS4 and just $28 less than what the console retails for.

A significant chunk of the cost goes to the AMD APU, which costs $110. The same APU on the PS4 cost Sony $100. While the Xbox One and PS4 use the same AMD APU, they differ in the kind of memory they use. The PS4 uses the costlier GDDR5 memory that costs $88, while the Xbox One comes with 8 GB of DDR3, which costs a total of $60.

The Xbox One controller is also less costly at $15 when seen against the $19 Sony pays for DualShock 4. The Xbox One controller features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios from Marvell Technologies. The Xbox One console also comes with an external power supply, which costs around $25.

The total cost of the console was at $332, with the controller and other hardware coming in at $139. A huge chunk of that is for the Kinect 2 sensor, which costs $75 to manufacture. Samsung and STMicroelectronics provided the hardware for the sensor, and there is an infrared light emitting sensor the manufacturer of which is not known yet. Other box contents like the headset cost $10, and the console assembly is at $14.

Both Sony and Microsoft are not making huge margins off their consoles yet, but these machines have a lifecycle of over a decade. As production costs come down and hardware becomes more affordable, they will be able to eke out more profits from the consoles. Both manufacturers have managed to sell over 1 million units during the first day of availability. They just have to sell a lot more to make any significant money out of the consoles.

Source: AllThingsD