First Kinect prototype cost Microsoft $30,000

"You'll be able to turn your family into bar codes on November 4."

Oh, great.

Kinect is going to stamp the Mark of the Beast on my family.

Does that include all the money spent on researching Kinect or is that just the cost for production? $30,000 for a prototype doesn't seem all that expensive.

"Are you Sarah Connor?"

That actually doesn't sound like a whole lot. What costs are included in that?

In fact, from the article the number is "hundreds of millions of dollars", which sounds like a more accurate number to get the cost down to $150. The $30,000 prototype was probably really crappy. :)

Huh, good for them.

I still won't buy Kinect at launch. Not with this rather weak starting line-up. ...
Sry, MS.

I was kinda hoping the Kinect itself wouldn't make a profit, so they would have to come up with quality games to make up the losses. Oh, well.

No way! A custom tooled, hand-assembled first prototype costs more than something stamped out in China by people making 1 dollar per hour?

That's like saying the Chevy Volt is a bargain at 45 grand because they spent 50 million developing it.

It's kind of a silly figure to tout. Paying software and hardware engineers 40+ hours a week for R&D on a new product always costs a fair amount.

I'm sure they gotta be taking some sort of loss on the sensor itself to start out with. 150.00 for it and whatever bundled software is dirt cheap considering development and production costs.

I'd rather they had spent it on that NEW xbox they were touting a while ago that would play current 360 games. Plus new games would be compatible with both consoles, but playing on the new xbox would beef up the graphics.
anyone remember that one?

That doesn't really sound like much. I'm sure Microsoft and many other companies have spent more than that on prototypes that didn't even go into production before.

This kind of seems more like a promotional piece than anything...

30k isnt much to Microsoft is it? Thats like me lookin' for change under my seat in the car to pay for a burger at lunch. Come on!

Kick em when they're up
Kick em when they're down
Kick em all around

"I'd rather they had spent it on that NEW xbox they were touting a while ago that would play current 360 games. Plus new games would be compatible with both consoles, but playing on the new xbox would beef up the graphics.
anyone remember that one?"

Yeah, because MS is short on cash that they need to funnel cost from Kinect to the next xbox.

30K is REALLY cheap if you think about it

Cheap compared to the $2 million some of the early large LCD panels cost.

XBOX!

(1 minute pause between words)

OFF!!


That just cost you, $15,000 dollars.

oh..just $30k?? MS took that Pocket money from Semi & Akeem.....

Laser projectors aren't cheap.

I thought someone else built the hardware upon which Kinnect is based and Microsoft licensed it because it was relatively inexpensive. Now Microsoft did acquire a company with a similiar product, but that product, as I understand it was not only technically superiror, but would have cost more to market and that is not the product upon which Kinect is based. But I could be wrong...

>>first
>>prototype

Not at all surprising.

I actually work for a company producing part of the Kinect and I can say that the actual technology inside is pretty amazing. Our part is something that has never been done before, so I can imagine the R&D costs were far beyond even $30k for MS on this.

Sounds like something out of Jennifer Government.

So how do you decide which twin gets to be twin A and which one is twin B? Obviously everyone will want to be twin A.

So then to decide you'll have to play that kinect fighting game to duke it out for the right to be twin A. But to play the fighting game, you have to distinguish yourselves as twin A and twin B.

It's a vicious cycle.

Why did this cost Microsoft $30,000 when the company that Microsoft bought that did the actual work of the camera, had a working prototype roughly 2 years ago? I remember reading about it in an issue of EGM back before they were shut down.

What will happen if you put two Kinects face to face?

Anybody with any intelligence could see that the article is just talking about the cost of making the initial hardware.

You guys are confusing cost of materials with developmental costs. When you have to physically built new parts (CPU, cam, etc.) for a prototype, you don't have scales of economy working for you. So each piece costs enormously greater than what the final product will cost. This cost of the physical prototype hardware is completely separate from the developmental costs (all those people you have to hire on salary to work on all the software/hardware).
You take a part out of the iPhone 4 that costs $5. Well, it costs $5 because they make millions of that part. At the prototype stage, since you're only making a few, it's much more expensive because you still have to build the machines to make that part. That cost won't go away. You can only shrink the cost by making tons of that part since the parts themselves don't cost that much.
Using a simple example, I had to create a shirt to sell to anime club members. I wanted to only make 100 shirts but was shocked that it would cost $80 per T-shirt at 100 shirts (and this was the cheapest company I could find that could do the design we created). No one is going to buy a T-shirt for $80. To get it down to $25 a shirt, I had to make a huge order. Because setting up the design was a fixed cost. Thereafter, just producing the shirt itself was fairly cheap.