Nearly all of Sony's assembly on PS4 was automated. I expect PS5 to be mostly automated as well, including the liquid metal. Too crucial of an item to leave up to human error. And of course once it's assembled, it goes through rigorous testing to ensure it wasn't seated improperly.
It's clear to me that Sony and Microsoft had a different goal in mind when designing their systems. For Sony, they wanted a single machine that was both powerful, yet cheap for the masses and could be produced in high volumes. It all makes sense now why they went narrow and incredibly fast. Their APU being over 20% smaller will reduce the system cost by an estimated $40. Knowing that fab was going to increase significantly, they opted for this smaller chip and clocked the hell out of it to basically allow the chip to reach the power limits of a console. I expect their overall power envelope to be similar to the XSX. My utilizing a huge heat sink, large fan, and liquid metal it is a bit more exotic than PS4, but it's also not a huge departure and should still be cheap to build. They save $20 over a vapor chamber cooling setup. They also save money on having a more uniform memory set-up, and less SSD ram even though their I/O may be slightly more expensive. I'd estimate we are looking at around $70-80 less expensive than XSX to procure and assemble.
Another focus of Sony's was obviously the developers, hence why we got an insanely fast SSD. This mattered far more than 18% more compute to them, and I think it will be worth it. Easier to develop for/optimize, really lets first party spread their wings too. With dynamic scaling such a thing, nobody is going to even notice resolution differences.
Microsoft on the other hand, knowing that they were going with a two console strategy, decided to not care at all about cost nearly as much in their design, hence a traditional wide and slow approach. It gets them the paper crown for specs, but it is considerably more expensive to produce. With Sony pricing the console the same as the XSX, they are losing significantly more on each console sold. Sony may not be losing much at all. I guess what's disappointing is that MS didn't decide to go even crazier in their design and up the price to $599. It seems that they really wanted to not be beat much on cost of the high end console.
This also is reflected in the way the consoles look. With vapor cooling, Microsoft was able to condense their set-up, whereas Sony needed to be more spreadout.
Now I can't wait to see the XSX vs PS5 third party comparisons. Hearing a lot of comments about how Sony's PS5 is extremely easy to develop for and there may be some surprises in terms of performance being better in certain cases.