The PS3 delay was about Blu-ray, and that tells you what it is

Sony pushed the PlayStation 3 to November two weeks ago, worldwide, and the thing worth noticing is that the delay was not blamed on the Cell processor or on manufacturing yields. It was blamed on Blu-ray, or more precisely on a copy protection specification that had not been finalised, which is a very unusual reason for a games console to be late.

That tells you what this machine actually is. Every console generation has a Trojan horse in it and Sony has never been shy about theirs: the PlayStation 2 put a DVD player in ten million living rooms at a moment when standalone DVD players were still expensive, and it is not a coincidence that DVD won. The PS3 is the same manoeuvre run again with a format that has a real competitor this time.

The specifications are extraordinary on paper and I do not entirely trust them. Cell is a genuinely strange processor, a conventional core surrounded by a ring of small specialised units, and the demos Sony has shown have been rendered by people with direct access to the architects. The gap between what a chip like that can do in principle and what a third party studio ships on a deadline is historically enormous, and Sony has been here before with the PS2’s Emotion Engine, which was also brilliant and also miserable to write for in year one.

Nobody I have spoken to expects the launch software to look meaningfully better than what the 360 is already doing, and the 360 has a full year of developer familiarity by then.

The number I cannot get past is the Blu-ray drive itself. Sony is putting a first generation optical mechanism, of a format that is barely in production, into a mass market box they need to build in the millions before Christmas. Nobody has manufactured that drive at that volume before. That is where the schedule risk lives, not in the graphics chip, and it is also where the cost lives, and the cost is going to show up on a price tag that people will react badly to.

Los Angeles in May is where we find out how badly. Sony has to stand up and say a number, and every conversation I have had in the last month has been people guessing what it is and nobody guessing low.

If it lands where I think it lands, Sony will have built a superb Blu-ray player that also plays games, priced against consoles, launched a year after its competitor. That worked in 2000 because the PS2 was cheap relative to a DVD player. I do not think the same trick works when your machine is the expensive option in both categories at once.