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Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

asia.nikkei.com

51–60 of 284 posts

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#51
This looks so amazing and I wasn't aware that Playstations are still manufactured in Sony's home country itself. I guess automation helps in keeping the manufacturing cost low.

Now I am intrigued about what high selling electronic devices are manufactured in their home country itself and not by the ODMs/CMs in countries with cheap labour like China.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#52
post #11

God I love my PS4 - it has to be the peak of this class of machine. I can't imagine how it could be improved upon without going beyond the "box under the telly format". Incredible piece of machinery. I can't imagine the PS5 will be much more than an upgrade. In my opinion the second best console is the PS2. I love Nintendo but they're more like toys than hard core gaming and entertainment machines. PS2 up until PS4 w…

I agree with you that I don't think the PS5 will be a major upgrade. It may be a hardware refresh but that's about it.

I think that you may be brining up a valid point we have a standards body to define the standards and labeling for the capacity of a gaming machine. (That would prevent games from always demanding the absolute latest hardware). However, a lot of the issues with the PS4 is you have sony trying to control _everything_ in the hen house. (Think of this like the Symbian vs Android situation) Android took off because it wasn't one manufacturer having control over the OS.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#53
post #50
post #34

If you enjoy that you will probably also enjoy the fully-automated Valve Steam Controller assembly line (including video)[0]. [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9890914/valves-steam-con...

It's not operating anymore though.

Though there isn't any proof of that, I would assume that it has been repurposed for production of the Valve Index controller.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#54
post #34

If you enjoy that you will probably also enjoy the fully-automated Valve Steam Controller assembly line (including video)[0]. [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9890914/valves-steam-con...

Watched the video before reading the title and was thinking myself how it reminded me of Portal (a puzzle-platform game by Valve).

Thanks for posting this! Very entertaining to watch indeed :)

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#56

This looks so amazing and I wasn't aware that Playstations are still manufactured in Sony's home country itself. I guess automation helps in keeping the manufacturing cost low. Now I am intrigued about what high selling electronic devices are manufactured in their home country itself and not by the ODMs/CMs in countries with cheap labour like China.

To me it's almost more surprising that with that high degree of automation they are not splitting the factory up into smaller ones and building them per-continent.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#57
post #3

In case anyone misses the link in the article, they have a graphic-rich version: https://vdata.nikkei.com/en/newsgraphics/sony-playstation/ (The content is different, though both articles cover the same topic. A bit weird)

"The PS looks impressive."

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#58
post #56

This looks so amazing and I wasn't aware that Playstations are still manufactured in Sony's home country itself. I guess automation helps in keeping the manufacturing cost low. Now I am intrigued about what high selling electronic devices are manufactured in their home country itself and not by the ODMs/CMs in countries with cheap labour like China.

To me it's almost more surprising that with that high degree of automation they are not splitting the factory up into smaller ones and building them per-continent.

They will still need to ship the parts which depending on the part might be coming from SK/Taiwan/China but I guess they can still reap the benefit of probably reduced taxes because of local assembly.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#59
post #45

Lots of folks here are talking about the latency and throughput, but nobody is amazed at what the robots are doing. Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard. I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit. Massive kudos to the manufacturing engineers who managed to pull that off.

> Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard.

Really? That's fascinating to me, given how accurate pick'n'place robots are. I would have thought they required similar capabilities.

Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

#60
post #45

Lots of folks here are talking about the latency and throughput, but nobody is amazed at what the robots are doing. Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard. I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit. Massive kudos to the manufacturing engineers who managed to pull that off.

I'm surprised they didn't design out stuff like tape. Although perhaps they did and the article actually means handling things like ribbon cables, which is super impressive, as humans can barely handle those.

Really. A dot of hot glue to hold a cable down must be easier.
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