SlashGear JapanHackers will take apart most anything electronic, and since the Nintendo Wii is probably one of the coolest – and oddest – gadgets to hit shelves in recent memory, of course the first thing a hacker’s going to do it dissect it. That’s what these guys did, ripping the Wii’s sensor bar apart to find nothing more than a couple of IR transmitters, meaning that the Sensor Bar does very little sensing and most of the Wii’s motion processing is handled by the Wiimote. Of course, now that hackers have a better understanding of the Sensor Bar, I’m hoping we see this nifty little technology ported elsewhere; nothing would be quite as cool as using the Wiimote as a computer mouse. But I digress; enjoy the video!
[via Engadget]
Alright, people, look. This isn’t the cure for cancer, or a way to obtain superpowers like Superman has. It’s a freakin’ video game console! In the madhouse that is eBay, PS3s are selling like hotcakes, often for outrageous sums of money that no one in their right mind would ever pay. 
In the world of gaming, game companies almost never make any money off of the consoles themselves; the software and licensing contracts bring in the big bucks. It’s extremely rare for a company to profit off the hardware at launch (like the Wii), but it’s also extremely rare for a video game company to be losing $200+ on each console they sell. That’s exactly what Sony is doing; according to iSuppli, the 20 GB PS3 costs $805.85 per unit to manufacture, while the 60 GB version costs $840.35. This translates to a $306.85 and a $241.35 loss for each 20 GB and 60 GB PS3 console sold. By comparison, the Xbox 360, one year after its launch, nets a $75 profit for each console sold. While the NVIDIA GPU, Cell CPU, and Blu-ray disc player combine to create a very impressive piece of hardware, maybe throwing all these ultra-expensive components in one box wasn’t such a good idea. We’ll just have to wait and see how bad a mistake this was for Sony.
