No matter how you shake it, the asking price of $249 for the recently announced PSPgo is a wee bit on the high side. Outspoken analyst Michael Pachter agrees, going as far to label the device as a rip-off. Pachter surmises that despite the inclusion of built-in 16GB flash storage, doing away with an expensive UMD drive means Sony will be making a healthy profit on each unit sold.
$249 is too much. Period… The [current] $169 PSP-3000 is a profitable device – the disc assembly, for a UMD, costs more than 16 gigs of flash does. So this new device doesn’t cost them as much to make as the PSP-3000 and they jack the price up $80…
I’m sorry to say it. I don’t want to get bad fan mail from the Sony fanboys, but… They’re ripping off the consumer until they sell a couple million and if consumers don’t buy it then the price is going to come down… they’re making a lot more money on the PSP Go than the PSP-3000. And the PSP Go helps them because there’s no piracy…
Pachter brings up a fair point. Although we were extremely impressed with the PSPgo at E3, both from an aesthetic and functional standpoint, dropping down what amounts to more than half the price of a PS3 is a hard pill to swallow. Regardless, it’s hard to complain, as Sony is giving consumers a choice between the 3000 and go. Being an early adopter is never easy.
