It’s $600, not $750. If you’re not including the price of a game in the PC price, you shouldn’t include it in the PS3 price either, and hardly anyone needs an HDMI cable (which you can get for $30 or less) because hardly anyone owns an HDTV.
[hijack relating to the $750 PC thing]
A quality power supply is important, but some people seem to be going way overboard on the wattage (and I’ve made that mistake in the past, I admit).
Right now I’m running just peachy with a 430W Antec Truepower 2.0 (surprisingly only $55 at my local computer shop, compared to $70 online), and I’ve got two optical drives and four hard drives (two connected via a PCI IDE card), an AGP video card, a PCI sound card, a PCI USB card, and a PCI TV card.
Most gaming systems don’t have the power-consuming extra hard drives and plethora of PCI cards that I’m using. The main reason to get a good PSU is proper voltage regulation.
When you buy an Antec or an Enermax or equally high-quality power supply, you don’t really need to spring for the $100+, 500W+ PSUs, IME. YMMV.
[/hijack]
I’m fascinated by the popular reaction to the iPhone… $600 is too much to pay for a gaming console, but apparently isn’t too much for a phone.
Haven’t you heard? Any electronic device doubles in value if it has a picture of an apple on it.
A year ago, I was very interested in the PS3, sort of interested in the 360, and skeptical about the Wii (still called the Revolution back then). Over the summer I got to test games on all of them, and my opinions essentially reversed. The PS3 feels like Sony tried to stuff too much crap into one machine and rushed it out the door before it was really ready. I’ve posted about this all before, if anyone cares they can search for it.
I won’t be buying a PS3 for quite a while, if at all. The price would have to drop by at least half and some more good games would have to come out for it. For Christmas I was wavering between a Wii and a 360, and ended up with a 360 mostly because they were lying around all over the place while the Wiis were all evading my pursuit.
You need to consider the competition, though. The iPhone is competing against other smartphones, which generally are in that price range. The PS3 is by far the most expensive console, more than double the price of the Wii, and at least 1/3 more expensive than the xbox 360 platinum edition. The iPhone is nowhere near that, and is even cheaper than some smartphones.
So, apples and oranges. $600 is too expensive for a console. Not too expensive for a smartphone.
Oh? Verizon’s most expensive smartphone (at least in my area) is the Treo 700p, $499 with contract. Cingular’s is the Treo 750, also $499 with contract. The iPhone is 20% more expensive than either. Which competing smartphones are more expensive than the iPhone?
Also, in light of the news that the iPhone won’t let you install third party apps, it hardly seems fair to compare it to a normal smartphone, from which you can get your money’s worth by expanding and customizing it with other software.
It is a fascinating phenomenon, isn’t it? I remember when the Mac Mini came out it sold for something like $500 and people were like “hmm. No. Kinda still too pricey.” Then the iPod comes out and people are all “$400? I want one!”
Sony is gambling on this phenomenon. People will pay 4, or 5 or 600 bucks on a gadget, but you just never know which gadget they’ll pay that for. Just because I’m willing to shell out $600 for a gadget doesn’t guarantee I’ll shell out $600 for your gadget.
The Wii just let me buy Altered Beast and Golden Axe. It wins.
OTOH, if you install an emulator on your PS3, you can play any retro game, not just the handful of games that Nintendo has put up for sale. (You can then buy the original cartridges on eBay or from a used game store, if you feel the need, probably for less than Nintendo is charging.)
The iPhone will also be $499 with contract. Wireless news article.
The price that Jobs announced was before contract. I’d doubt very much that Cingular would release the after contract price to Jobs to announce, in any case.
That’s only the 4 GB version. The 8 GB version will be $100 more.
And the Treo has, what, 64MB?
But that aside, if no 3rd party apps is confirmed (and it’s such a bone-headed move I can’t believe it until it is), then I will be very… disappointed.
[/hijack]
The Treo isn’t trying to be an iPod. 64 MB is plenty of space for contacts and notes, but 4 GB is tiny for a music and video jukebox. In any case, you can add a 4 GB SD card for $50, which is $50 more than the iPhone but also gets you the ability to install your own software - arguably the defining characteristic of a smartphone.
Hmmm.
In 2001, I built my current system for slightly under $600 US.
-Currently running WinXP, check.
-Athlon 2600+… looks like we’re good there.
-1GB RAM… again, apparently that’s plenty.
-NVidia FX 5200 video card with 256MB of RAM.
So my $589 built-by-the-lowest-bidder-who-happened-to-be-me system that I built with off-the shelf parts- from a single local store- can run EQ2 but yours won’t?
Sorry, that should have said “GeForce FX 5200”.
And the “not minimum” in the EQ sysreqs was added by me.
The cartridges won’t plug into the PS3, last I checked.
If I want to emulate and pirate software ROMs, I could do that on my PC.
The cartridges are to satisfy Jiminy Cricket when he whispers in your ear that ROMs are bad, mm’kay. If you own the cartridge, you have every right to play it on an emulator.
You think the Wii isn’t emulating them?
“and pirate” is an essential part of that sentence.