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.
Early in the game, you'd hack machines to run mechanical-turk style jobs to earn money. Later you'd build a factory to manufacture more processors... ;)
Some of the first bitcoin faucets had captchas to “reduce spam”, as in prevent humans from getting too much free bitcoin, but really the captcha was a real captcha that a bot was stuck on, and was just paying humans to solve them to access some greater bounty
Morally ambiguous, but I actually implemented exactly what you’re describing back when bitcoin was at $50-100. I found some service that would pay me $1 for every 1000 captchas I solved, and then I scraped that and built a BTC faucet site (I think I called it captchacoin.com, or captchabit.com) that would essentially pay the user $0.50 in BTC for each captcha they solved.
It went from 0 captchas per day to 10000 captchas/day over the course of about a month with just word-of-mouth. Then the upstream service just quit paying me with no explanation. My accuracy rates were good. Maybe latency was high? I don’t know why they terminated it. But I struggled to keep the users while finding a replacement, and in the end I shut it down.
On the one hand, I’m bummed, because that thing could have mostly run itself and made a tidy profit for someone still pursuing a degree. On the other hand... maybe it was for the best: 90% of captcha solving work is paid for by spammers who make the internet worse.
Have an upvote for the story, but don't pretend it was "morally ambiguous". That was plain evil with one level of detachment, and helped enable spammers and scammers.
Not only scammers and spammers are restricted by CAPTCHAS. Helping bypass them would only be immoral if they were never used to prevent scraping or other illegitimate purposes.
Thats a huge misconception actually, the information you have is the amount of energy being used, but you don't have information on the source of the energy.
Would you be willing to accept or at least corroborate that cryptocurrency mining is one of the cleanest sectors and a boon for sustainability?
70-80% of that energy use is renewable energy or reducing pollution - specifically hydrocarbons. So existing energy is not being wasted or reallocated, and additional unclean energy is not being ramped up to facilitate mining, and previously wasted energy that was going into the atmosphere is now being used.
The educated discussion is to make sure it stays this way. As nation states are the only actors that could mine at a loss with inefficient ways.
I actually utilized an API that did just that in some automated software I wrote with a friend a few years ago. Was actually sort of interesting how it all worked with sending the captcha then checking for the solution string after the person had solved and inserting that back into the page before carrying on.
Pretty sure at the time the cost was something like .013 cents per solve. I always wondered who the people sitting there doing that were or what their situation was.
The combination of being played on a real world map and covertly growing/spreading reminds me of Plague Inc. I wonder if any inspiration came from this.
There is a very interesting and creepy story about this called The Gig Economy [1]. Machines end up sending gig workers to do inane tasks, like photographing a certain building at a particular time, to take advantage of bizarre arbitrage opportunities too complicated for a human to notice. Eventually, everyone is just a peripheral of this enormous, inscrutable system skimming money off the real economy.
Reminds me of a short run podcast called The Program (https://programaudioseries.com/). It's a historical documentary about the rise of "The Program" which is basically an AI directed gig economy becoming the economy. It asks people to do strange things for seemingly arbitrary reasons but it makes sense when you realize what all it is doing.
Early lights out production. The problem became obvious a little later, for NeXT, which was that these things only make sense at very high scale for products that change infrequently.
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
Specifically, in the context of assembly, as long as dimensions and locations of each connector stay the same, it does not really matter for the automated assembly line.
I was trying to clean the dust out of my PS4 a little while ago, and had to browse through quite a few YouTube videos before I found a disassembly tutorial that matched my model.
Years ago I worked for a company that had a PCB production line, and even for relatively low volumes (compared to consumer electronics) they used basically that exact process. The PCBs would be printed elsewhere and delivered in flat stacks, the boards would go through pick-and-place, solder bath, reflow, through-hole, wave solder, sometimes xray inspection, etc. Also had a tour of an Iomega plant when I was much younger with similar processes.
Not sure if NeXT was a pioneer in those techniques, but they seemed standard by the late 1990s and 2000s.
The top tier "chipshooter" style pick and place machines are going our of favour these days.
Their golden days were during the first cellphone boom. Back then, the level of integration was lesser, and you had more discrete components on more smaller boards, and volumes were of course very high during the boom time.
Now, you can have a "dumphone" made with just 30 parts on the pcb, and very few passives.
From my experience over the decade, people running factories came to love having multiple, cheaper mounters, and more lines.
The "superboard" concept is also seem to be waning, as you see more, and more individual boards in products like smartphones. It makes for less manufacturable designs, but additional labour expense is not dramatic.
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.
My guess is that they have flex cables (and not so much ribbons) and tape. Other electronic devices - including modern ones - that I've taken apart lately include quite a lot of both.
Tape takes a number of forms. Holding down flexes to manage pull-out forces is pretty common. You can do that with traditional single-sided tape if you have the space on something to adhere it, but increasingly common is a double-sided tape on the flex itself. You peel off a liner and stick it down. It wouldn't surprise me if there are liner-less heat-activated tapes too, but I don't know of them myself. That's outside my domain.
I changed the board on my 3D printer today, the biggest hurdle was all the wire and plug manipulation. I play guitar, piano, type all day, you'd think I'd be good at it. It was like trying to pick up a grain of rice with two cucumbers.
When I work with this type of thing I use different kinds of tweezers (chip pullers, flat/round end, angled, etc). The ends of most FFC/FPCs are reinforced partly to provide good contact in their mating connector and also to make it easier to insert the cable with enough force without damaging it.
The spiky-ended tweezers will damage an FFC though.
All the manufacturing engineers I've talked to hate doing fluid dispense. Glue is in a class all its own because if you take the line down it tends to cure in the dispenser or nozzle.
I took apart my PS4 Pro several times since I own it. It’s very easy to do, nothing is glued, and the plastic clips that hold the cover in place don’t break when you unsnap and snap them back.
The only thing is an obnoxious warranty void sticker that delaminates if you don’t lift it carefully but even then I don’t think it’s legal to void the warranty with a sticker (Switzerland, bought from a EU retailer)
There is a interview of Elon Musk with MKBHD. He was precisely referring to this as being one of the issues when they were trying to automate the pipeline. The machines just couldn't plug a loose tube in its place. Maybe they should have consulted with Sony.
Tesla tried it because the technology was mostly ready back then. The difference is a PlayStation has vastly fewer cables, far simpler routing, and problems can more easily be fixed. People can physically pick up a PlayStation diagnosis the problem and then put it back, try to do that with a car.
Also, Sony has to hit a much lower price point, and they made about 10x as many consoles last year as Tesla made Model 3s. Both of those seem like they'd make the automation ROI better for Sony.
What does "lights out" mean here? Is it a way to describe a nearly fully-automated production line?
If that's the case, then aren't they using it for Model 3/Y already? If yes, then I have to disagree with you, because neither of those cars look anything like Cybertruck, even stylistically.
EDIT: thanks for explanation in the replies, it makes sense. If anyone has any additional insight as to how it affects production lines that are, let's say, 90% automated and 10% manual, your contribution would be heavily appreciated.
The pure definition of “lights out” refers to a fully automated facility where human hands never touch a product during the entire manufacturing process. In theory, a true lights-out plant would operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with downtime only for routine maintenance or repair.
I think what Elon learnt from that experience is that manufacturing things is hard, and that building that knowhow and ability to both build and troubleshoot robot factories like this one is not something you do overnight, even if you hire the best engineers.
Basically it’s unlike software and that might be where he stumbled.
Andy Grove used to talk about this a lot - that manufacturing know-how does not come easily, and that continuous improvement and innovation in manufacturing depends on continuing to actually do it.
Exactly. Things built for vertical assembly, like the Sony Walkman and the Apple Macintosh IIci, are easy to assemble automatically. All the assembly moves are straight down.
This has those annoying cable connectors that have to be slid in edgewise. Yet they got that to work.
I'm amazed that Sony let out detailed pictures of the cable connecting operation. Looks like they use both a camera and a force feedback wrist.
> Cables and tape are not as uniform and have a tendency to move in random directions.
I'm sure someone's probably already thought of this, but couldn't you deal with that by having two manipulators that hold the cable by both ends while keeping a small amount of tension on it? The cable could be picked up by dispensing it through a narrow U-shaped hole (to stop the loose end for grasping), or by gluing one end to a dispenser reel then having the one of the manipulators follow the cable to the other end like a person would pull a rope through their fingers.
Pick 'n place are usually only XYZ fixed-envelope cartesian systems with additional part rotation about one axis. Sometimes the XY is replaced with dual rotary units (SCARA), or XYZ are replaced with delta systems. See https://www.valin.com/resources/articles/five-types-of-indus... for a good overview here. Plugging in cables requires fine and reliable gripping at two ends plus additional degrees of freedom, and a clear path through a more complex motion envelope for access. This generally necessitates a move to arms, which come with additional issues (play at extreme positions, repeatability constraints, higher cost, power and space requirements, non-square envelope, slower motion, etc.) Having two of these work together on a flexible part means very fiddly parallel control of two systems with these drawbacks. Basically it's expensive because good end effectors cost a lot, parallel control exceeds conventional industrial requirements, industrial control systems are purposefully non-standardized, sensors have to be added in an application-specific manner and subsystems prototyped as requirements are identified, and experienced talent is hard to find.
I think it’s in part due to the pressure thresholds to put cables in, as too little pressure means the cable isn’t connected but too much could damage either the cable or thing it’s attaching to.
Maybe part of the success is in pre-packaging the wire and ribbon to act predictably, similar to how ribbons of surface mount components come on uniform tape reels instead of loosely in containers. You can crease or bend things to be predisposed to movement in certain directions.
> I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit.
Seven years production run (or more), that should explain a lot. Even if hardware revisions changed significantly in that time (I wouldn't know) that's still a completely different calculation than something that changes annually, or even twice a year, as Sony's own Xperia phones used to.
Could you elaborate the cost merit thing? It was my main question and I couldn't find anything on it. How much do they save using robots instead of people to attach some cables? Is the benefit in failure ratio or do they actually expect to save some money by designing and building robots?
This is only tangentially related, but the dictionary isn't helping me distinguish between these two concepts. In networking what is the difference between bandwidth and throughput, if there is a difference?
The other comment regarding latency/throughput is a good place to start because those can often be in contention.
But bandwidth is not quite the same as throughput either, so I'll answer your question genuinely. Bandwidth typically refers to the actual channel capacity for a single link. Maybe that's your PCIe lane, your wifi channel or your HDRadio channel. The bandwidth is often measured as the spectral width of the channel in frequency. But those channels include some coding for error detection or compression.
Ultimately what matters most is what kind of throughput the channel can deliver. This is the metric that is often measured in bytes or bits per second. A one gigabit Ethernet card is intended to deliver one gigabit/sec of throughput with the Ethernet channel coding. So if you hooked up a test device to your NIC it should be able to drive frames through an otherwise unoccupied channel at one gigabit/sec. But to keep the example interesting, end-users would generally measure throughput with all the added layers of coding and protocol provided by a network stack. The term "bandwidth" is much more nebulous when someone uses it to describe traffic spanning various buses and network media. I'd take context clues and assume that this usage of the term is somewhat like throughput. Though perhaps you could consider the independent physical channels as a single logical one and extrapolate some kind of conceptual bandwidth?
Sorry, starting to ramble a bit at the end there but I think you may get the gist.
This is a fantastic video, extremely well done in my opinion. I remember fanatically watching "How It's Made", in that show they focused on more run of the mill assembly lines for generic plastic things and usually there was a ton of labor involved. The video linked here was really the first time I saw this level of automation and my jaw nearly hit the floor, the technology industry has created some incredible feats of engineering.
I watched How It's Made with my kids for a good number of years, and I was just amazed that the parts that were automated worked as well as they did. It made manufacturing look really complicated and that human hands were the most important part of the assembly line.
Very few high end factories would allow some random journalists to poke around. Some candle factory is a different story I suppose. But you are right,I'd love them to visit some more modern shops.
> The controller completely serves it's purpose- replacement for a pure mouse control for non-controller native games.
Maybe I didn't give it enough time but it definitely didn't do that for me. I gave up trying to use it as a mouse replacement and as a normal controller. Here's a video of Internet Superstar Rich Evans solving that problem much more effectively [0].
And have you ever actually tried to use something like that? Because I have and it's insanely uncomfortable.
Look- if I don't want to sit in front of my computer but want to be in front of a big screen (projector in my case).. that's because I want to be able to sit back and relax.
Holding a controller I can sitback and relax, my wrist is not moving all over the place. I'm basically stationary except for my fingers. That is HUGE for me as I otherwise sit infront of a computer all day.
How in the world do you get comfortable sitting on a couch trying to use a keyboard and mouse to play a game?
Definitionally they kind of are inevitably the final solution. We will either totally automate all production, go extinct, or get trapped in a loop of destroying civilization putting the survivors back to pre-industry and having to rebuild in perpetuity. Its only a question of time scales.
A game console is also a fairly simple thing since everything is on one fully-integrated motherboard. Boiling it down to the essence it's a robotic process of inserting an already-fabricated ready to go board into a plastic case. Or two boards if you count the 110-240VAC input power supply to DC module which is in an xbox one or PS4.
It really helps make sense when automation is a sibling product line or you're able to partner with an automation business. Given the detailed pictures of the assembly line for a critical product at launch, I'm suspecting that automation R&D and presentation is a factor here.
Sony is also a huge company who can leverage experience from this across several markets. It certainly makes more financial sense to use the playstation budget to make this happen rather than start with one of their bluray players.
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.
Japan always had its “peculiar” approach to electronics manufacturing automation. While rest of the world tries very hard do design out any kind of “fiddly” steps, Japanese manufacturers got very good at automating such things. Just look at any kind of Japanese home AV gear with its typical large single sided boards full of obviously robot placed jumper links and thru hole components.
I have a feeling that automation slowed down in many sectors when China came "online". I think this cycle is coming to an end, and there is no comparable pool of labour anywhere in the world so that fully automated factories are going to be the next step (that wasn't technically possible in the early 90s but I think we now have the technology or very close to).
> I have a feeling that automation slowed down in many sectors when China came "online".
The largest high quality AC to DC power supply manufacturers used to all be Taiwanese companies. And they manufactured in Taiwan. At some point about twenty years ago with increasing wages, benefits and cost of living in Taiwan they started looking seriously at opening factories in mainland China and other places. Delta, for instance, has a big factory in a low-wage-area of Thailand. Now instead of going for full robotic automation and continuing to make power supplies in Taiwan, most of them are made by more manual labor intensive processes in places with much lower wages.
The top ten Taiwanese x86 motherboard manufacturers also did the same.
" there is no comparable pool of labour anywhere in the world " -> this is not fully true, as when wages in China started to rise, lots of labor offshoring moved to SE Asia (e.g. Vietnam) and there's still a lot of potential for the same to happen in various African countries.
You made a prediction that these places will never be comparable to China. What do you base this on? What prevents India and African countries from establishing special economic zones that are attractive to foreign investors?
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.
Cameras. There's a split within (the dwindling pool of) camera manufacturers about what they'll build in Japan/Germany and what they'll outsource, and where they'll outsource it to.
So you have, say, Olympus designing some lenses, software, and bodies, outsourcing some lens design (probably to Sigma - it's something of a closely guarded secret, although it seems all the major camera companies outsource at least some of their lens designs), outsource some of their manufacturing to other countries, while some remains in Japan.
As to why, check out Yongnou's EF-mount 50/1.8 and 35/2 lenses and you'll see why Japanese manufacturers want to keep their designs as far away from China as they can.
This seems interesting. I checked and it seems Sigma makes everything in Japan. Amusingly enough all the well selling digital camera manufacturers(Fujifilm, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Olympus) are Japanese.
A motor company I know of makes their small-runs, specialty, and high performance motors in Japan and the rest in Indonesia. However they recently switched to a fully automated, lights-off factory in Japan to make their new product lines.
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.
Electronics are fairly light, you probably don’t save much by shipping raw/incomplete products to the consuming country for final assembly. It’s not like soft drinks, where you want to bottle them close to the point of consumption so you aren’t shipping the dead weight of water around.
Also shipping the manufacturing/automation technology is not particularly cheap, not to mention the amount of on-site setup/calibration that would be required.
And on-going operations, troubleshooting, remediation, upgrades, etc. I either ship my teams out there on the regualar, or else hire locals. And that leads to questions of intellectual property leaks, security holes, fraud & waste, etc.
I'm an industrial engineer, so I geek out about this type of stuff.
Shipping stuff is pretty cheap, but distributing the supply chain and creating multiple factories making the same product is incredibly expensive.
Let's say you have a hard drive supplier. Now rather than the supplier shipping to 1 factory, there are 5. Freight rates are going to be higher because you have a lower volume. Increased demand on one continent means you need the right balance of material going to that factory rather than simply upping the order for your single factory. Incorrect sales forecasts now mean you have inventory in Europe but need it in the US. You either need to pay to move it, try to get your suppliers to reroute things (always for a fee), or build finished units and ship them to the US, potentially facing higher tariffs than shipping in components [1]. Inventory costs are higher while you figure this all out, and you have increased logistics costs.
You're paying a (bigger) team of people to manage this, and expediting shipments as needed (likely at 3-10x normal cost depending on how expedited, market demand for shipping, etc).
Then there's product consistency. Even if you order identical equipment and keep all the same suppliers, you'll have different issues at each facility. Sharing best practices around the world is challengings and frequently done poorly. [2]
Then you have tariffs and government regulations. If you were 0.25% of GDP for a country, you can go to the government and lobby harder than if you're 0.05% of GDP in 5 different countries. [3]
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[1] https://hts.usitc.gov/current offers some light trading if you want to find tariffs for the US. They're incredibly detailed, and the smallest difference could change from a 2% tariff to 60%.
[2] I know of a distributed manufacturing setup where two "identical" factories have significantly different quality outputs. The best rationale they've come up with is a difference in altitude and climate.
Corporations who have distributed manufacturing like this often have a corporate team who travel between locations checking how well locations are adhering to the company defined best practices.
[3] Definitely don't discount this step! I've worked for 4 manufacturers professionally, and I know for a fact 3 of them have pushed for tariffs and exemptions from regulations. #4 likely did too, but I don't have a specific example in mind. In each case, the difference in profits were 7 or 8 digits long.
David, in my work in China, I often get surprising realisations like "this factory makes 90% of these widgets in the world" while the factory in question may look like a dusty shed. The "super-centralisation" phenomenons are all around.
People may think that simple, generic items may gravitate to competitive markets, but with modern manufacturing equipment, even very small factories can have sky high productivity.
At around 2014, I was working on arranging manufacturing for one netbook design, and I went to South China to pick suppliers for mechanical parts.
A company called RKX hinge was the biggest notebook, and cellphone hinge maker in the world with more than half of global market share. To my surprise, they did not have a website at the time, not even a sign on the door.
They were a small, 2 storey factory in Baoan, with an office on the factory floor, and "a warehouse space" made of dangerously tall pyramids of boxes in the corner of shop floor.
Thanks for the response! A lot of interesting points I hadn't considered!
For the product consistency, I assume you are talking about non-fully-automated factories? With full automation "adherence to best practices" hopefully shouldn't be as hard to ensure, I hope.
For tariffs, if we assume that a big part of the specific industries playes are distributed internationally, the size of the industry in general should be the much more significant factor, as you are not lobbying individually anyway, right? If you can even go as far as fluidly shift production between countries you should be to negotiate better lobbying deals, which I understand is how the automotive industry operates to some degree?
>For the product consistency, I assume you are talking about non-fully-automated factories? With full automation "adherence to best practices" hopefully shouldn't be as hard to ensure, I hope.
Automation certainly helps, but there are quirks and hiccups you could run into. Let's say you built a factory every 5 years. Along the way some machinery vendor goes out of business. You might or might not have the machine design, the rights to make another version, etc.
As you build out, you figure out things that work well or don't work well, and you make adjustments to your process accordingly. Building every factory identically or at the same time is probably a bad choice unless everything is really well fleshed out. The marginal benefits of upgrading older factories to the new standard is rarely economically viable.
>For tariffs, if we assume that a big part of the specific industries playes are distributed internationally, the size of the industry in general should be the much more significant factor, as you are not lobbying individually anyway, right? If you can even go as far as fluidly shift production between countries you should be to negotiate better lobbying deals, which I understand is how the automotive industry operates to some degree?
The actions I've seen (not limited to former employers) include CEO's meeting with high level federal government officials, getting local property tax exemptions for expansions bringing jobs, and collaborative industry group action about unfair dumping of product on the US market.
Remember each manufacturer in an industry group has a different structure. Some things are good for the industry as a whole, and some are more beneficial for one manufacturer than another. CEO's advocate for their own company too, not limiting public actions to trade group actions.
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Previously I hadn't covered capital expenditure. Building factories is super expensive and tooling factories is also super expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if the facility and tooling would run 100M-500M.
Even in manual assembly, you'd have jigs and tools to buy, go/no-go guages, etc.
> If you were 0.25% of GDP for a country, you can go to the government and lobby harder than if you're 0.05% of GDP in 5 different countries.
Minor point on this great post, it would actually be 0.01% instead of 0.05%, because the amount in each country is divided by 5x, but the GDP is also increased 5x, for a 25x percentage decrease.
Not really. You went from negotiating with one country to negotiating with one country of the same size (just 5 times). In an individual negotiation you are still facing a single equivalent country (with no GDP increase).
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.
If anyone is interested in factory automation I'm working on a site to catalog different processes. A good design can often be recycled into a similar machine.
> Just a few humans were present to deal with a handful of tasks -- two to feed bare motherboards to the line, and two to package the finished consoles.
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but, especially the first task, seems rather trivial compared to what they achieved with their robots? Even the second one, If I remember correctly Amazon does/did this manually because every single package is different and no robot flexible enough, but I assume in Sonys case packages are all exactly the same. Doesn't sound a whole lot harder than plugging in the cables.
So why wouldn't they automatize those steps as well?
Loading into the sort of packaging used for electronics is definitely hard to automate. For low margin products it used to be universal that boxed items were manufactured where labor was cheap, and that's for very simple to load items.
Automation is improving at a rapid rate though. I've definitely seen automated boxers for some simple to load items start to show up.
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, the delicate movements of compact robots resemble those of human arms and have surprising warmth.
Loyalty to the group - family, workplace, country - is huge in Japan. The expectation is that those who are no longer productive for society will still be taken care of, by family, prior workplace, or society. And then the US is on the opposite end where you are largely treated as on your own where you find the most hostility to automation.
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.
"The 31.4-meter line, completed in 2018, has the ability to churn out a new console every 30 seconds."
That seems.... slow? I mean, I have no idea what I expected, but 2 a minute, is that really fast for this type of manufacturing? How does that compare to Xbox or maybe iPhone output? I'm sure 2 a minute is really impressive, but I started reading that thinking something like hundreds or thousands an hour, I guess I was naive.
It’s ambiguously worded (up to vs up to and including), but the article actually specifically describes humans packaging the final product: “Just a few humans were present to deal with a handful of tasks -- two to feed bare motherboards to the line, and two to package the finished consoles.“
I believe that number to be for just that length of factory line.
The factory as a whole presumably has more production areas than just the one pictured.
The other article, kindly linked in one of the replies, states the following:
"In this area of 31.4 meters by 6 meters, it takes just 30 seconds for a team of 32 robots to build a PS4. "
That's kind of implied by the images. But if only two completed units come out the end every minute (regardless of how long it takes an individual unit to be assembled), that does seem a little underwhelming. There has to be more manufacturing lines than just this one to move millions of PS4s every year.
525,600 minutes per year * 2 units/minute = 1,051,200 units per year (assuming 100% uptime)
32 robots on the line. If each is always doing its job on a unit(because it's a pipeline), and a unit gets all 32 pieces done in 30 seconds, then each robot is spending about a second on its unit. That means a completed unit every second.
I've programmed ABB, Epson, Denso, and Fanuc 6 axis robots (no Mitsubishis, but I've seen a few) and there's no way that those robots are running at 1-second cycle times. Maybe with a delta or SCARA, but just moving 200mm and back with the inertia of the robot alone will take you on the order of a second.
It's almost certainly 30 seconds part-to-part, taking 16 minutes (minus 30 seconds for each of the stations that have two or more robots) from the start to the end of the line. It's not particularly important how long it takes from the start to the end of the line, and they'd be unlikely to share that trivia with a journalist - but part-to-part cycle time is important.
If the TAKT time demanded a completed unit every second, they'd run multiple lines.
Controls engineer here - no, that's pretty normal. I'm accustomed to automotive work, but I believe the electronics assembly lines are similar. The flexible materials handling stuff (connecting flat flex cables? Applying Kapton tape?) is indeed super impressive, but the timing is ordinary.
A sizeable 6-axis robot like those used here has a minimum cycle time of a second or two for the simplest possible "move in, place the thing, move out" operation. They're not ultralight delta or SCARA bots, they're about as fast as a human can control their arm. Also, there's a second or two lost while the pallets moves along and are parked at the multiple stations along the line, you want to design the system to maximize the ratio of useful on-station time to transition time.
The line is bottlenecked by the slowest process. You can make a slow station run in parallel - as in the photo at [1] with the 16 stations arrayed around the robot - but that adds a lot of complexity. I'd assume that their requirements were to accommodate up to ~8 minutes for burn-in testing at that station, and that by the empty stations, the software guys ended up only using 4 minutes. You can't make the whole line wait that long, so you spend the extra effort and introduce extra complexity by buffering parts there, but now your process has forked and needs to be merged again - really a pain for tracking suspect parts or tools. All that matters is that you unload each pallet before it needs to move on and replace it with a completed part.
Some stations may be doing nothing but running a 5 second electrical test. If there's some station that has to pick up a cable, photograph it, analyze it, contort it by rotating robot joints through large angles, plug it in, and get out of the way, that could easily take 10 seconds. Others may have a human who needs to keep up. Others might be heat-staking a plastic component and need time to blow on the stake until it cools enough to be unclamped. Others might have multi-headed tooling and can connect several different parts all at once. 30 seconds is a nice middling part-to-part value if you've got a few complex operations, a few human operations, and don't want heavy robots slinging your expensive parts around at high speed. I wouldn't have been surprised at a 10-second cycle time, but 30 seconds is still reasonable.
A final consideration is that you don't want an entire factory dependent on a single line. If you want to produce thousands of parts an hour, it's much, much better to have 10 identical lines that work at a 30-second cycle time than a single line frenetically thrashing to put out out parts in 3 seconds. If one line goes down, you still have 90% capacity, and can probably catch back up. If your single line goes down, you're in big trouble.
I visited the BMW factory in Munich back in 2015; at the time it was manufacturing mostly the 3-series models (not sure now).
It was a generally fascinating experience; the most interesting piece of trivia was that, when scheduling the build order, they try very hard to avoid putting station wagons ('Touring' model) back-to-back.
This was because the build-time of the rear-window assembly on the station wagon took significantly longer than other models due to the rear wiper, and that you would get a literal pipeline stall if you had to do too many together.
Can you, or someone else, share your experience in becoming a Controls Engineer?
Is your educational background in Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering?
I’ve always found programming robots to be fascinating. And especially when building a robot to build other robots. I’m sure others will be interested in learning of this as well.
Most of the available training for this stuff is vendor-specific, vendor-provided and really expensive to undertake. Indeed, many vendors have solution provider networks who will prefer to do this programming for you, because it is so unintuitive/dangerous/error-prone.
You can, however, learn the control systems by grabbing and reading the manuals. Look for manufacturers then seek out manuals. Many are online though they are often not the latest edition as some manufacturers now seek to keep this internal to paying customers.
All the systems I have seen use G-Code variants with manufacturer specific extensions. Many now offer GUIs to help with spatial planning, multi-machine integration, common code generation, etc. However, at the end of the day it is still nearly all about generating/writing/modifying/replaying stored G-Code.
I double-majored in computer and electrical engineering. In those courses, I learned how to create PCBs and wrote code for FPGAs, microcontrollers, and a few desktop applications. As my sibling commenter mentioned, a ton of the actual implementation is vendor-specific and there's a mix of RTFM, on-the-job training, and vendor classes. Also, quite a bit of https://xkcd.com/627/.
One of the most important parts of my education learning that there is no black magic in technology. Everything we manufacture is a pyramid that builds complexity using leaky abstractions. At the lowest levels, you have atomic physics of doped silicon and charge carriers. At the highest levels of abstraction, you interact with those atoms by saying "Hey, Siri, do I need an umbrella today?" Someone, somewhere, either understands or wrote a tool that understands every layer between those two. We're a few decades out from the time when someone could think about the whole stack all at once.
If you want to really program robots, you need to understand a bit of the technology with which they're built (encoders and servomotors, control loops, motion planning, real-time operating systems) and then just pick up a teach pendant, and apply what you know. Do be aware of the value in abstractions, and don't try to reinvent the wheel, but if you don't know the fundamentals you'll be tripped up every time the abstraction leaks a little.
I didn't touch a PLC or robot until after college when the job required it. It's true that working effectively is all about familiarity the toolsets provided by various manufacturers, but I don't think that would be an effective thing to teach in a university setting. If you posted a listing for a recent graduate controls job requiring experience in your particular flavor of robots or PLCs, you're going to have a bad time - anyone with a CS/CE/EE/ME background could do it. Learn how to work, learn how to learn, learn how to plan, and by that time picking up a teach pendant and getting the robot to run a loop from point A to B and back to A will be the easy part.
Thanks for your insight. Out of curiosity, why don't more of such production lines have dedicated machines that each do one small/simple action and then send it to the next one. It seems many seem to deploy general purpose robots that mimic human hand/arm features (that I would imagine have a higher latency cost in terms of controlling,positioning,etc). Is it so that you can manufacture multiple products with different assembly steps?
I work in automation, but of biological processes (vaccines) and we have the same production issues with bottlenecks/capacity planning/down-time mitigation, etc.
> Out of curiosity, why don't more of such production lines have dedicated machines that each do one small/simple action and then send it to the next one.
Specialising your tools or machines comes at a cost: inflexibility, specifically changeover time between different products. If your machine can only do exactly one thing, the changeover time is "physically replace the machine", which may mean a delay of months.
Changeover time is a massive, hard-to-see drag on everything in a factory. The ideal manufacturing machine station can instantly switch its use between any two consecutive products moving along the line. Physically impossible, but ideal. Fully-programmable robots are much closer to that ideal than single-purpose machines.
That said, the tradeoff depends on the product/process spectrum. Some products are produced in "job shops", meaning an extremely flexible, high-touch environment, turning out very short runs. Others are worker-paced or machine-paced (which is what the Playstation factory would count as), mostly this is used for consumer goods. These still retain some flexibility, as much as sensibly possible.
At the far end are "continuous process" plants. These are very specialised to the product. Bottling plants, chemical plants, oil refineries and so on, where flexibility is not a highly meaningful advantage and the product lends itself to being treated as an undifferentiated flow as opposed to discrete units of product.
I recommend Matching Supply with Demand by Cachon & Terweisch as a first book to read. Then follow with the more in-depth Factory Physics by Hopp & Spearman.
We are also assuming that the article is worded correctly. It could very well mean that the assembly time for 1 unit is 30 seconds total from start to finish, and the wording is just inaccurate. It happens a lot with articles like this, so who knows.
EDIT: another commenter points out that another version of the article does indeed say 30 seconds to complete one unit, as opposed to “one unit per 30 seconds”
>another commenter points out that another version of the article does indeed say 30 seconds to complete one unit, as opposed to “one unit per 30 seconds
How would that even be possible? Also what's are the start and end state here? Just pure assembly? Surely printing the PCBs can't possibly take a fraction of 30s. Neither can placing and SMD soldering the components.
I have to agree, if this ran all day it'd produce 2880 consoles. How do they keep up with launch demand that sees millions of units shipped in a span of a month or two?
Indeed, the lifetime sales of the PS2 were 155 million, which would take 147 years to produce at this rate. But the "graphical version" of the article that it links to says instead the following:
> In this area of 31.4 meters by 6 meters, it takes just 30 seconds for a team of 32 robots to build a PS4.
So presumably there is more than one PS4 going through the pipeline at once for more than 1 per 30 seconds.
Yes it does seem slow, and being an assembly line I wonder if it's just poor communication in the news article.
I'd think that 30 seconds would be how long 1 PlayStation takes to be assembled, but that there would be a new one every few seconds coming out of the line.
Electronics manufacturing has been moving to more and more automation for years. Humans don't place components on PCBs anymore (well, most components). it's done by machines that look more like a gatling gun than human arm. It's quite stunning how small the components are these days.
I am happy that China reached the point where their average wage is high enough that we can finally resume the manufacturing automation effort that kinda stalled since the 90.
Powerful example of operational innovation, and that there is so much untapped opportunity we are not leveraging in so many areas.
A company like Apple may not have the wherewithal or impetus to do something like this. When they need manufacturing, they are resigned to the traditional approach: China. Since labour is cheap there, and they just may not be thinking in these terms and may not have the wherewithal either ... the cost-effective solution invariable involves high labour intensity.
It may very well take factories like this to inspire other organisations to have the necessary 'Eureka!' moment to grasp that they too, might be better off 'fully automated' as well.
Note the eye-watering scale of the business however, quoted at nearly $100 Billion in sales, which is rather a lot of money indicating that it may take a product with a very long life cycle wherein there are considerable profits for this to be feasible.
Looking at this, one has to wonder why Western nations are not more keen to duplicate.
> Note the eye-watering scale of the business however, quoted at nearly $100 Billion in sales, which is rather a lot of money indicating that it may take a product with a very long life cycle wherein there are considerable profits for this to be feasible.
You mention Apple. The iPhone SE 2 is basically "iPhone 11 guts in an iPhone 8 shell" – and as I understand it Apple went to software to handle things like the camera so they could keep the older generation optics and not change the body. That type of tick/tock cadence would support this nicely.
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 was pretty much the pinnacle, but I think the way PS4 improved upon it is the development platform, and the online experience (which even so does require some improvement). I still play games on the PS2 from time to time and they still feel viable as offline single-player experiences and I could imagine development for the PS4 could continue for 20 years or so and still be producing great and relevant games.
Where to from here? VR is one obvious route but may I suggest a HN-friendly alternative? Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves? I think in order for this to be viable in terms of protecting the profitability and stability of the ecosystem there are some business and technical challenges but I would love to see them take this direction. They've dabbled before with the Yaroze system and Playstation Linux … both had their business operational issues but hardly insurmountable?
EDIT - can't respond below any more so I just have "one more thing" to say:
> PS4 is famous for being the cheapest sony home console relatively speaking
and what exactly is the problem with that? This is a feature not a bug. The PS3 was a novel system with exotic hardware but it suffered from some very serious flaws. It's reliance on proprietary technologies meant it was harder for developers to work with. It never took off as a result and is little more than a footnote in the lineage's history. A learning experience if you will.
Surely an extension of making something easier for professional developers to get to grips with is making something that hobby developers (and other classes of creative) can get to grips with?
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.
But realistically, how much extra would the end users be able to add? I understand those were great days and people could do a lot just by knowing where to soldier and etc. Not sure it'd work the same way tbh.
Creative tooling has come a long way in 40 years. We’ve got blender, unity, sketchup etc - even minecraft now that I think of it. I’m not talking about BASIC and assembly but basically opening up the platform for the development of this kind of tooling and charging to use it the same as they do gaming presently and controlling the distribution similarly
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
The PS3 ran Linux at the beginning. That went nowhere for Sony apart from a lawsuit when it got patched out and consoles getting racked for cheap compute at the beginning.
I don't remember the specifics apart from the GPU being inaccessible which just made it a PowerPC server. But i suspect that experience killed off the idea internally for quite a while.
Maybe it would be a last resort if the Playstation does lose out to game streaming (not that i think it will).
There is no such thing as a failed experiment. It sucks to be the guys who lost out when Sony decided they didn’t want to support their Linux base any more but at that stage they’d gotten what they want out of it. Sony has a history of engaging with the hobbiest community in a tight and controlled manner and their’s no reason to think they might not bring this on another notch in a later generation. Albeit in a tight and controlled fashion, but just open enough to get engagement, as is their way.
I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM
When i enter the notification quick tab it takes 30-40 seconds to show the message I've received, then another 10-15 to accept it.
Currently one single game, COD:MW consumes the entirety of the space on the device. From launch it wasn't ever going to be enough. You need to keep <x> space free because the update->patch->relink process needs to duplicate the game.
The menu system is also insane and makes no sense.
The PS4 Store App has to be one of the most poor implementations of something so simple i have ever seen. And despite enabling every level of security possible i still get DM spam that could be detected by a python 1 liner.
On the COD:MW lobby screen alone the console appears to turn into a 747 on take off.
Games are frame locked at 60fps - awful by PC standards and in a world of crossplay, a disadvantage. Performance limitations also limit FOV settings etc etc.
The controller battery life is terrible and it doesn't have bluetooth audio.
> may I suggest a HN-friendly alternative? Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves?
> I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM
Means nothing though, where is the software? These supposedly dated and under-powered machines are still where the production of some of humanities not only most ambitious art of the last 100 years but most profitable art is being produced.
>I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM
I'd like to see that phone. The PS4 was slightly weaker than my AMD 7870 at the time. If I could get the performance of a 7870 on a laptop without a discrete GPU that would be amazing.
Turns out it's grim. Even a snapdragon 855 doesn't even reach a single TFLOP... [0] If you want to wait until the end of July you can get a phone that breaks the first TFLOP (snapdragon 865)
Meanwhile the ancient 7870 had 2.56 TFLOPS (which is what I am equating the PS4 with). Twice the performance of the unreleased snapdragon.
Going from 4 years ago to a GPU that hasn't even been released yet not even scratching the performance of a PS4 turns your entire comment into a big disappointment.
Yes there is room for improvement, but this is what I mean that these are further iterations on the same platform. The "Ghost in the Machine" however remains the same. Hard to see how that can be improved upon! The noise of the thing is crazy!
> I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM
They really, really didn't. And still don't. And won't for a good while yet.
Cell phones work in a power envelope that is basically 1/50th of what PS4 uses. Assuming that power consumption/unit of work done drops by half every two years (and it doesn't), it would take a decade for a PS4 in a cell phone power envelope to become feasible.
The very newest cell phones have GPUs with more raw compute power than the PS4, however they still typically have less than half the memory bandwidth, and that raw compute power is only usable for very short bursts.
To be fair, Call of Duty games are notorious for their poor coding and design. I never have the issues with any other games that happens with COD. Not sure if it's an odd dev team, or if they really trying to wrangle performance out of the hardware that makes them do all these kooky things.
There's a very common complaint that COD requires double the game size free space to download updates, regardless of the update size itself. This is ridiculous and not something that is common to other games.
> When my PS4 Pro is playing stuff like TLOU2, it sounds like it's going to start hovering off my TV cabinet.
I have the CUH-7200 PS4 Pro model which is apparently the quietest model and it's insane how loud that thing gets when I played TLOU2.
The copying times for updates/patches is equally bad with downloading taking a few minutes and copying times taking more than 20mins. There's clearly alot of room for improvement - At least Sony have realised this as the PS5 will have a SSD instead of a HDD.
I ended up buying the standard PS4 6 months ago because I had less than fond memories of the noise my first-gen PS3 made. I don't have a 4k television so it seemed like a good decision even though a Pro would have been nearly the same price.
The newest PS4 slim is silent and TLOU2 graphics are still incredible.
Cleaning out the dust makes a massive difference. The PS4 actually allows easy access to the fans and vents by popping off the top plastic without voiding the warranty.
I have read many complaints online of people calling the PS4 noisy. I have a PS4 slim, and it is very quiet, the optical drive is by far the loudest part of the machine.
They must, I've been playing TLOU2 on my ~1 year old PS4Pro and it's very quiet, almost silent. I've never heard it make much noise on any game, even when ambient temps creep into the mid 80's.
It depends how you have it placed, too. I played on a 2 year old Pro and it was extremely loud, but I have it stuffed in a media center cubby, so it's always suffering from low airflow.
You are probably missing the fact that PS4 became obsolete the same year it was launched and it couldn’t be otherwise.
They can’t change the console capabilities, because games would not take advantage of it, as a ps4 game need to run in all ps4 versions.
If you want to upgrade the hardware, you have to launch a new product, as they are doing with ps5.
It’s all about having a stable ecosystem which allows developers to spend hundred of millions and be sure to reach all ps4 users. And milk that cow for years.
The same will happen with ps5: incredible machine at launch, obsolete within 1 or 2 years, but will remain in the market as is for 7-8 years while development houses (and users) reap the benefits of the ecosystem.
Sony’s PS architect/chief Kutaragi always had that kind of bright future thing, like “today we are sailing out on this new PlayStation platform and by the end of this decade the whole nation will be driven by this open machine and its groundbreaking processors doing every tasks beyond our imagination”.
And I thought he was full of it, and PS was always very obviously just another game console, and he’s also the culprit of why PS2 fat had IEEE1394, why PS2 compatibility sucks even against its own variants, why PS3 sucked in general, why there isn’t much gap to be perceived on the chart between launch day prices of PS3 and Wii, why there were some Cell based PCIe boards that were more or less space heaters, maybe also why Vita got RAM slash, also probably why Microsoft tried digital home hub concept in XB1 only to have the always funny division chief seek for new opportunities, and his absence is probably why PS4 and PS5 are just almost completely sane no nightmare gaming consoles...
Anyway Kutaragi was the PS guy from PS1 through PS3 and I guess that’s what you’re talking about.
I love my PS4 but.. it's really slow. From turning on to getting in a party will take minutes, especially when loading the friends list and their profiles. Beyond this, getting everyone into the same lobby is also tedious due to host issues. I don't know if the Xbone has similar issues but I remember the 360 being able to sign in, be in a party with my friends in under 30 seconds and it just worked.
Xbox is better but still not as good as the Xbox 360 imo. In terms of software (excluding games), it feels like both consoles took a major step back this generation.
Aside: Voice controls got a lot worse with Cortana than what was available in the Kinect, not that anyone cares about that in 2020. ‘Xbox pause’ was magical in 2012. Universal search was better in Xbox 360, too.
I don’t know why they took such a major step backward with the new design, but everything got a lot more slow, clunky, and difficult to use. Made the whole thing feel like a downgrade.
It does feel like a downgrade. I would have paid more if I could have picked optional features. I'm not sure if they don't get that people don't buy a console to play the dashboard, give it to me barebones and lightning quick.
Really? I thought this at the start as well, but downloading games is fast, I have a wired connection (20MBd/15MBu) that I feel like is pretty solid. I also wondered if it was just my drive getting full, but I have about 180gb of space.
> Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves?
The appeal of a console is that it's an appliance - you can just plug the thing in, not worry about any of the technicals, and go play games with minimal fuss. If you are an enthusiast of such things and inclined to tinker, I think making a Mini-ITX PC to stuff under your TV mostly effectively already covers this niche? You can pick out your parts to your liking, it will be small, it can run Linux, play VR, and be programmed and customized effectively to however much of your system you can grasp.
And Sony, who has spent like 80 years making locked down media formats for their consumer audio/video/gaming appliances that compete against industry standard formats, is unlikely to ever be the company that makes an open gaming platform.
C64 shipped something like 20 Million units over its lifetime. You could use it as a gaming machine (many did) - or you could go further if you wanted to. The appeal of consoles to many in the industry is that it was locked down and you could ringfence your revenue but that's not to say you couldn't address these issues with modern commonly available technologies like digital signing and cryptography. Basically like what Apple is trying to do but that could certainly be improved upon in terms of implementation.
> C64 shipped something like 20 Million units over its lifetime. You could use it as a gaming machine (many did) - or you could go further if you wanted to.
How is this state much different from installing Steam on a PC with a couple controllers and sticking it in your living room, besides the C64 being extremely cheap and (as far as I know) not as customizable?
Cheap and providing a long lived homogenous platform. Apple do this to a certain extent but not at the price point. You can customise with peripherals.
I would argue that the PC is (or will be) a longer lived platform, with homogenized interfaces that let it stay in the game far better than the C64 could dream of. My budget 8 year old PC - which initially had the cheapest CPU I could possibly buy for the socket - is able to handle itself admirably well, even on newest generation games because of how far progressive PC upgrades can carry things these days. Meanwhile, I'm confident there is likely a complete chasm in what could be accomplished on a C64 with peripherals vs a cheap 386 PC Clone released just 8 years later (or an 1990 Amiga, or a Mac for that matter). And even a Mac of comparable price from the same era as my own PC would have been a shelf piece far earlier than this PC will be.
PCIe slots can carry you pretty darn far, and if you can use a Genesis cartridge, you can upgrade a PCI slot. For instance, on mine I added: USB 3.2, an NVMe slot, and a new graphics card. If I wanted to, I could throw in a faster network card. I could easily use the latest generation graphics cards without issue. I can play a game with at least 60fps in 4K. The only thing that really limits you is the CPU socket and the memory. Even then, after a few years you can throw in the highest end (or near highest end) server CPU for dirt cheap and some better and larger sticks RAM for not so bad a price either.
> The appeal of a console is that it's an appliance - you can just plug the thing in, not worry about any of the technicals, and go play games with minimal fuss.
Also there was certainly a chasm in capability between the 386 and c64 but the games weren’t there and you would have had to spend a lot more. At that stage anyway we had Amiga which really wasn’t surpassed by PC architecture until maybe the late 90s
Because of online cheating I doubt Sony will ever open up like they did for PlayStation Linux. My guess is they'll just clamp down harder to differentiate from PCs which can't deliver the same consistency. Of course the PCs openness is what breeds so much innovation.
Not even close, in fact PS4 is famous for being the cheapest sony home console relatively speaking. PS3 costed more and was sold with losses.
PS4 was made with very cheap hardware in mind, and the next generation seem to be committed to cheapness as well. For those prices a PC gets better hardware and well, it's also counts as a PC.
Even a PS4 Pro is weaker than a One X, and both are behind a cost effective PC. and most games don't even run at a 60 fps which used to be the case 2 generations ago. Worse than not running at 60 is stuttering, for most games 30 is more than enough, but when the console can't keep that rate it is annoying to see framerate drops.
I agree. The PS2 is great. It's the bare minimum needed to achieve a good 3D experience. PS3 and PS4 are good because they add more horse power but the controller is almost the same and the single player games that can be created on these consoles are not that different from what was possible on the PS2. The PS3's strong points mostly revolve around online multiplayer.
> I love Nintendo but they're more like toys than hard core gaming
Some of us really love our toys. Playing MarioKart or Super Smash Bros. with my kid makes both of us happy. I used to have a PS2 and owned quite a collection of titles but I think playing Nintendo games is a joyous experience that PS2 and its titles never delivered.
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.
> Android took off because it wasn't one manufacturer having control over the OS.
Yet iOS really started that market and maintains its customers exactly because it's a single company controlling the OS (and doing it rather well, to be fair). And while its market share isn't that of Android, it can hardly be called a failure.
> As soon as Apple runs out of an audience that platform is dead.
That's true for any platform, isn't it?
I mean, I see your point about an open platform, but on something that's intended to 'just work' like a PS, trading openness for guaranteed working games and known-good [enough] quality is fair enough. The platform only needs to keep its side of the promise (and not be a monopoly, which would open another can of worms).
I've always wondered if you could automate a sort of standard assembly system with a certain amount of adjustments within some parameters (device dimensions, how things are connected)... and pump out any number of different electronics all on the same assembly line / factory using the same robots?
Granted that probably already is a thing, or isn't for good reason.
As you might imagine, this is already the case in places like Shenzhen - there's off the shelf “building blocks” for machines - not necessarily to any written standard, though. In this[1] Strange Parts video he mentions it. If you watch some of his other videos you'll start to notice that many of the machines actually look similar - I highly recommend watching them, they're great.
That video was incredible. The machines that makes the product, the lithium ion battery for your iPhone, is this super intricate process, that outputs the final product. And everything is made from the raw materials.
Now, this is what I call a true fabrication process.
'Industrial lego' as some call it. Get all right bits and pieces, put them together and you have a production line. Every piece comes with detailed specifications, performance curves, maintenance instructions etc - which means an industrial part is more expensive than consumer grade stuff doing the same task. But when you're building a big machine you don't want unplanned downtime.
If you give up maximum throughput for flexibility, it's indeed possible to do just that, and AFAIK that's how many factories are operated. There's also a mix and match where you have "subunits" that operate specific subsection of assembly line in specialized manner and provide general resources to multiple further areas (if you play Factorio, such subunits can be directly compared with Assemblers or Assemblers blocks in bigger production lines). An example of such a block cane be manufacture of pipes or PCBs.
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?
Taking out the human element. China knows it's coming and it's a big reason they're "investing" in poor countries. They won't have the upper hand on cheap labor soon.
I'm so fascinated by lights out "autofac" manufacturing. Instead of amazon warehouses along I-90 let's just have "autofac" clusters that can make most anything.
There is also some (if limited) utility in having someone on the line doing stuff, watching stuff, and serving as a form of QC. You can hang in the control room watching the latest, greatest SCADA software run things, but it's useful to have some eyes-on as the line runs.
I seriously doubt it. The PS4 has a custom graphics API which directly creates command buffers in the GPUs native format. There's not really much of a graphics driver at all other than what's necessary to isolate the game from the OS.
