Please enlighten me.
In the context of all of the other components and R&D my point is that $15 is small fries. Many of us would have made different choices on where to cut corners. Sony did it with the drive.
It's not unreasonable for me to have an opinion based on admitted rough estimation that does respect my understanding of other costs on things like retooling manufacturing line and availability of components in the supply chain. People seemed to want an idea on what the cost was so I did my best. Sorry if my opinion bothered you.
I'm referring to this:
In the context of major components it is a small part. I realize $15 spread over millions of consoles isn't insignificant. But then why did they bother to spend more on a better wifi chip? Or spend the R&D on a new case when they could have saved millions using a special color and keeping the old design plus better cooling.
I mean, the whole system is bigger for a reason. It is heaver for a reason. You cannot slam these internals into a PS4 and hope for the best. Everything is designed for precision, whether its a PS4 or an XB1 or any kind of mass manufactured electronic item.
$15 is a massive sum of money across multiple consoles. Microsoft dropped the Kinect port off the XB1 S. They then offered free adapters to Kinect owners who were upgrading to the S. Why would they do this? To save, I dunno, maybe a buck?
Sony dropped the audio optical port off the PS4 slim. They also removed the touch sensitive buttons. How much do you think they saved there? Pennies? Possibly so, given how old optical ports are.
Even if $15 is spot on accurate, which is definitely isn't, it would be a huge savings for something that they have actual data on whether consumers would actually utilize it or not.
It would have been nice if they included it, but it's more of a sign of how the UHD market is doing that they felt its omission would benefit them more than including it would have.