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

asia.nikkei.com

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

#211

Post by cbmuser »

actuator wrote: post #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.

PlayStations are manufactured by different companies.

Some are made by Sony EMCS, some by Foxconn and so on. Whether the PlayStation company let's them manufacture by one of Sony's own OEMs or a third party company is usually a matter of which OEM has the best offer.

Sony normally uses their own OEMs for the first batches, for low-volume products and for domestic products.

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

#212

Post by noir_lord »

sbierwagen wrote: post #169
411111111111111 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these boards werent consumer producs though. playstations are produced for years with no alterations.... millions of times. i.e. playstation 4 was sold ~100million times. thats most definitely at a scale where you can automate with margins.

Game console manufacturing definitely is low-mix compared to cars, but it's not like they're stamping out spoons: depending on how you count, there were something like 19 revisions to the PS3 motherboard, as Sony worked to reduce chip count and shrink PCB size: https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Motherboard_Revisions

If the level of automation is sufficiently cost effective perhaps they’ll have fewer revisions on this one.

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

#213

Post by cbmuser »

actuator wrote: post #58
hobofan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not necessarily. All components can be made by Japanese companies. Whether Sony uses a Japanese supplier or a company from the other countries you mentioned is a matter of the production volume and which supplier makes the best offer.

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

#214

Post by smoe »

impalallama wrote: post #207

I wonder if this speaker to its nature of being a Japanese article but the tone is largely awe and pride of the accomplishment lacking the usual fear of automation and jobs lost I see in other such articles. >“If you keep watching them long enough, they will start to look like humans,” said one engineer. The look in his eye is gentle like a father watching over his children. Unlike large robots that lift heavy items,…

I don't know if it is just cliche, but I have heard that Japanese people have a very different relationship to robots/automatization than western countries.

Were we immediatly think Skynet, they see something that helps them.

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

#215

Post by cbmuser »

everseason wrote: post #202

So why do most of the PS4s I find on ebay all say "Made in China"? Are the parts made in China and then assembled in Japan at the Kisarazu plant? Or are they only making PS4 units in Japan for the domestic Japanese market...and making the rest of the world's units in China?

Sony uses multiple OEMs, including Sony EMCS in Japan and Foxconn in China.

Usually, the first batches of a Sony product are made in Japan or the ones sold domestically.

If you buy an early PlayStation 1, 2, 3 or 4 in Japan, they're usually all Made in Japan.

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

#216

Post by cbmuser »

pphysch wrote: post #15
rusk wrote: 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…

> Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves? We could even call these novel x86 devices "personal computers".

The PS4 is specifically not PC-compatible. It's a different x86-subarchitecture.

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

#219

Post by tasssko »

vmception wrote: post #101
zbrozek wrote: 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 had invested in a semiconductor factory early last decade, and it had started making bitcoin miners, it had reminding me of Zion from the Matrix because it seemed like the first time that a machine could make another machine which could immediately start earning a negotiable asset and then transacting for resources. Very surreal to think about.

I always considered a machine backed conglomerate to be the next big thing.

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

#220

Post by rusk »

pphysch wrote: post #89
rusk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! This is what I was driving at. Looping history back to the days of the C64, Amiga, Spectrum etc. where home tinkerers could make a massive contribution to the ecosystem. These were the gaming consoles of their day. Yes there were the NES and Atari 2600 but the popularity of something like the C64 is something that modern console vendors (especially at the PS4 price-point) should be falling over themselves for.

The PS(4) hardware and its exclusive software exist to sell each other. I don't think there is any desire to complicate that relationship from Sony's perspective.

You’re confusing Sony with Nintendo there. Sony have always been very open to third parties, albeit it in a very tightly controlled way. Would make sense to deploy their model massively
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