Jay said:
BD computer drives are completely different from standalone decks because your PC is there to do the rest of the work. Your PC provides the software decoder application (and all the licensing fees that entails), the hardware to run it on (CPU, RAM, video card with DVI or HDMI), a power supply, and a fancy GUI.

These are all things that must be built into a standalone deck, and that's not including other hardware like the IR receiver for the remote, the remote itself, etc. We're not talking about a DVD player here either because the processing power required for smooth 1080p playback/fast forward/rewind is much higher than 480p.

And since a standalone drive doesn't have to do all the other things that a PC does, all of that is built into a few chips. A standalone drive needs a chip to decode the video and display it. A standalone drive is far less complex than a PC because it only needs to do one thing: play Blu-ray discs. Everything from the disc menu to the movie is all handled by the disc and then interpreted by the machine.

It might surprise you to know that the $150 Apex I mentioned was nothing more than a DVD-ROM drive connected to an IDE port with an mpeg2 decoder chip on a board. That's all. I would expect a Blu-ray player to be similar but with an mpeg2, AVC, and VC-1 decoder chips. Hook it up via SATA and be done. Of course, it ends up costing more due to all the "copy protection" bullshit that they have to load into the players. That cheap Apex let me change the region code any time I wanted. I'm betting you can't find a single "hackable" Blu-ray player on the market yet, mostly because they won't let the Chinese build any.

Have improved engineering and parts consolidation led to lower manufacturing costs? Yes. Have costs gotten low enough to provide a decent profit margin when selling a deck at $200? I highly doubt it.

Of course not, because they won't license the tech to the Chinese where the players can be made for cheap. Instead, they're choosing to keep the tech in markets that have higher costs. That is my gripe.

You may not have been trying to assert that standalone decks should be cheap because BD drives are cheap, but you were trying to tie discounts on BD drives into discounts on standalones; one has nothing to do with the other. You might as well compare holiday discounts on toasters and microwaves because they both heat up food.

All I was trying to show was the similarity between discounts of ROM drives to that of standalone drives. I was trying to show that both got discounted heavily leading up to Black Friday and the whole thanksgiving weekend and then went right back up in price. I fully expected the ROM drive to go back up since it was a one day deal. I honestly didn't expect standalone players to go back up as much as they did.