After dominating the market with the PS2, Sony’s next console got off to a pretty bleak start by comparison . It was more expensive than its competitors and a year later. Now we know the culprit, in part, of the latter.
It is neither more nor less than a laser diode that cost about five cents . Phil Harrison, a former head of Sony Interactive Entertainment who now works at Google Stadia, explains on the IGN Unfiltered show that there weren’t enough of these , so PS3 ended up coming out later than planned.
It turns out that the transition between DVD and Blu-Ray was quite complicated:
In this particular case, the move from the red laser to the blue laser was actually a very sophisticated change to how the optical head of the reader worked. It was mixing a little physics and a little chemistry, because what we were doing was actually a crystal. And they just couldn’t be made anymore.
In other words, Sony’s demand for these parts exceeded the quantity of them that could be made . We don’t know when PS3 would have come out if it had had enough of these, but Xbox 360 certainly wouldn’t have gotten as much of an advantage from it.
