Alright, so you’re the CEO or something of a giant company, and you happen to have a really successful product, right? And lets say that after a few years you decide to tweek it a little bit, by making it in general even better. You still have some of the old models, and they’re still perfectly good, so what would you do with them? Mark them down a bit in an attempt to get them out of the warehouse, or keep them at the same price? If you’re a normal, sane human being you’d probably mark them down a little bit to free up some space on the shelf.
Unfortunately, Sony doesn’t appear to be very sane right now, at least in my opinion. After revealing the new PS3 models earlier this week (sporting an even slimmer profile with 250 GB or 500 GB’s of hard drive space) they also revealed that the older consoles will be getting “no price drop formally”. In other words, you could either buy an older 320 GB version of the PS3 for $300, or you could buy the new, even slimmer 500 GB version for… $300.
Not much incentive to buy the other consoles there, eh? My guess is that Sony is washing their hands of the older consoles, and letting the stores offer different deals to move the older models out. If they won’t let the stores sell the consoles at a discount, all they’re doing is saddling those stores with stock that they can’t get rid of, and I don’t think anybody really wants that.