We believed that at this point the PS5 and Xbox would be cheaper than ever. The hallucinating thing is that it is happening just the opposite

Sony has just announced that all models of their PlayStation 5 consoles will rise $ 50 in the United States. The argument that Sony has used in its statement To explain the decision is that there is a “difficult economic environment.” Or what is the same: they blame tariffs. But that is already a generalized trend … and very unreasonable. PS5 rises around the world. It is the same that happened in April in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, when this company He also announced that prices went up for some models. In Europe, for example, the PS5 digital edition cost 499.99 euros. In the US, these increases affect all models, and the new prices will be activated as of Thursday in that country, being like this: PlayStation 5: 549.99 dollars (before $ 499.99) PlayStation 5 Digital Edition: 499.99 dollars (before $ 449.99) PlayStation 5 Pro: $ 749.99 (before $ 699.99) Prices for accessories, yes, remain unchanged. Microsoft already did the same. This movement is the same as Microsoft also with its Xbox Series S/X consoles, which They also rose in price at 50 euros In Europe and the US. Even the controls and some accessories saw their prices increased. And of course, Nintendo. The Japanese company took a long time to end up lowering the price of the original Nintendo Switch, but the Switch 2 has given it the excuse for uprise even more Even in the games. Not only that: the economic situation has caused Nintendo that Prices upload of the original Nintendo Switch, the Lite edition and the accessories. These data have not been met for the latest Sony and Microsoft models. In fact, the thing is totally the other way around. Damn tariffs. Most video game consoles are manufactured in China, and tariffs have especially affected the Asian giant. That certainly makes manufacturers more expensive to manufacture and export them to be able to sell them in the US or Europe. And if they want to keep their profit margins, they end up doing something logical for them and terrible for consumers, because we are the ones who end up paying the duck. But some manufacturing costs have dropped. The amazing thing about the situation is that both the PS5 and the Xbox Series S/X are now cheaper to manufacture (let’s not say the original switch). After five years in the market (nine in the case of the Nintendo console), the components of these consoles have dropped in price: their cost was then very high, but after all this time those components have ended up becoming almost obsolete compared to the new chips that have appeared in all this time. So what is happening? Not everything has come down. In fact, these consoles are based on GDDR6 memory chips and NAND chips for their solid state units, and there the prices They rose strongly in 2025 and 2025 for the relative shortage of this type of chips and the focus that manufacturers are putting in HBM memories for AI accelerators such as those of Nvidia. To this are added other costs not directly related to the material invoice (BOM), such as logistics, manufacturing energy, or marketing. The dollar loses bellows. But it is also the green ticket has lost value in front of the euro and other currencies. After 80 years being the pillar of the world economy, US tariffs They are starting to destroy it And that also translates into the price increases of everything. Including consoles. Less “boxes” are sold. Consoles manufacturers used to lose money with their models in the initial periods. The idea was always to recover those losses of plenty with the sale of physical games, but the rise of the sale of digital editions, the free-to-play games and the subscriptions have made the distribution of value change. For Sony or Microsoft the solution is simple: if we no longer recover so much value with the games, we upload the price of the hardware. But all that already happened before. The truth is that the situation is in many cases analogous to which it was lived with the PS4 and the Xbox One for example. These consoles ended up falling in a remarkable price over the years, but here a perfect storm has been created. One in which inflation, dollar weakness, tariffs and new video game access models have caused the worst result for users: more expensive consoles. In Xataka | 60 euros for a camera, 90 for a game. The worst (and best) of Nintendo prices for switch 2

50 years later the amazing thing is not that Microsoft continues to exist. The hallucinating thing is that it remains (Tan) relevant

Does 50 years Two young people called Bill Gates and Paul Allen They created the one that has become the largest software empire in history. That April 4, 1975 was born Micro-Soft. The name occurred to Allen, what years later I didn’t remember why he used the script and that capital. The detail has remained in anecdote. One of the thousands which are already part of the history of a company that has managed to be relevant and toe for half a century. There are not many in the world of technology that can boast something like that. How did you do it? Windows 10: 9 very useful and little known tricks Reinventing himself. Microsoft has been lifted after each fall. And there have been many. And very important. But it was not so at the beginning. Microsoft, like all the big ones, was loved long before being (deeply) hate. Gates and Allen were in the right place and moment, but they also knew how to take advantage of their opportunities. The first arrived in 1980, when they reached an agreement with IBM to provide the operating system for its PCs. It is curious how history is repeated again and again, because that is just what would happen to that operating system that would end up calling themselves. Gates and Allen did not create that operating system: they bought the original, QDOS/86-dos, for $ 50,000, and modified it so that it could be used on the IBM PCs. Apple did the same with Nextstep (based on FreeBSD) When he bought Next and ended up turning that operating system in Mac OS X. years later Google would buy a small startup called Android Inc. to take advantage of an operating mobile system that he had created. That said. The story ended up. But those are other stories. That agreement with IBM was a turning point, but above all it was for its terms. Microsoft received $ 430,000 for that product – very less than Ibm hoped to have to pay – but Microsoft maintained the ability to sell its operating system to other companies. From that moment Microsoft was a rocket. One controlled by a Gates implacable and fierce. With their lights and their (many) shadows, Gates and his company would soon begin to achieve the goal that They had marked and that a priori seemed impossible: put a computer in each home. It did not matter others doing things in a different or better way: Microsoft always managed to impose itself. He did it with MS-DOS and of course he did it with his long and erratic Light of Windows operating systems or with its office suite, Office, today maximum expression of the intention of how everything can (but should not) become a service in the cloud. For 25 years, Microsoft was no one to cough him, but then the earthquakes began to arrive. First, Internet, browsers, search engines and social networks. Then the smartphone. Redmond’s company lost all those wars. Always late and bad, and he was convicted of that Innovative dilemma in which David wins the game to Goliath. But there is the really amazing. Microsoft fell and lost those wars, but he got up again and reinvented. Even those that had won – like that of the browsers, With Internet Explorer– He ended up losing them, but we insisted: it didn’t matter. There we saw the true strength of Microsoft. It didn’t matter if the general public hated her: they did not give up and tried one, and another, and again. They failed with bing in search engines, they had to spend 26.2 billion dollars to “compete” on social networks and also shipwrecked (Too bad) With Windows Phone. And once again, it didn’t matter. Faced with these failures, new successes. Not only that: definitive reinvention. After the arrival of new contendliere NadellaMicrosoft changed the image and of strategy. Of being hated and almost ignored it was relevant and even loved. He got it shyly In the mobile segment, but where he has achieved an exceptional triumph has been in the cloud, where Azure marks the pattern with his great rival, AWS. And since then and along the way, many more stories, many smaller and large failures and also many small and large hits. It is impossible to put them all here, but it is also inevitable not to mention legendary products. Among them the Xbox, pillar of a very forty bet But not especially fortunate For the video game segment. Or also the successes that the company also achieved with the devices of the Surface family. The Hololens were Another failureYes, but one that at least showed that the company always tried to reinvent himself. In those is precisely now Microsoft, but this time not to lose what may be the most important train in history: The artificial intelligence. His reaction thus has been faster and more ambitious than on other occasions, but still the unknowns about the result of that bet are enormous. Whatever happens, it will probably give the same. And it will give the same because Microsoft will end up doing what you have always done. Reinvent yourself. Happy 50, Microsoft. In Xataka | Bill Gates has told how he made Microsoft into the giant that is now: “I focused my life only on a single job”

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