It was recently reported that next-gen Xbox consoles may retail somewhere between $1,200 and $1,800 unless Microsoft subsidizes the cost, which brings into question what will happen across the aisle at Sony. According to reputable tech insider Kepler, "PS6 [bill of materials] is approximately $200 lower."

While that might sound reassuring, it would mean that the PS6 still costs $1,000 to $1,600 to manufacture. There's no guarantee that Sony will sell the console at a loss, and that figure is before tax and other additional costs, so it would likely be even higher for the consumer. To put in perspective what kind of leap we might see at major retailers, the PS5 Pro's official MSRP is $899, but Walmart sells the same hardware for $1,649 — a $750 bump.

A console that breaks the $1,000 ceiling with its official MSRP will be ludicrously expensive at major retailers, but as Kepler explained, consoles take years to design, and nobody at Sony or Microsoft could have predicted the AI boom that sent component prices skyrocketing.

Of course, Microsoft isn't an innocent victim, having spent over $100 billion on its OpenAI partnership.

"People really need to understand that designing a console is a 5+ year process," Kepler said. "Sony and MS never intended to release consoles for over $1K. There was just no way they possibly could have expected RAM/NAND prices to go up by 5x."

Last year, Kepler predicted that the PS6 would cost just $600, whereas now they report that memory alone will cost Sony over $680 per console .

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