1. Moore's law dying means that older nodes are still very useful, so there's still lots of people bidding for capacity on these 8 or whatever year old foundry nodes who are willing to pay lots of money, meaning that base costs of the CPU and GPU haven't fallen as quickly as one would expect even in the absence of 2-4.
2. The Pandemic and then Russia's invasion of Ukraine screwed with supply chains quite a bit, and caused an inflationary spike.
3. Trump's tariffs affected the profitability of these consoles, and inserted a lot of uncertainty into them because nobody knows how the tariffs situation will evolve over time, or if Sony will get reimbursed or not for the illegal tariffs that were levied against them. The uncertainty and general animosity towards the USA has also caused the US Dollar to slump in value relative to a lot of currencies, which then pressures Sony to raise prices.
4. The current RAM, SSD, and GPU shortages caused by LLM hyperscalers is again spiking the costs of their components
eigenspace•1h ago
My guess is that this is because the USA was the last holdout region for the Xbox having any degree of market penetration, so they kept prices there low in order to totally kill the Xbox, and have now decided that it's time to start recovering those lost margins.