by Tweeg » Wed Feb 5, '14, 3:25 am
Actually, this is a great strategy. Trade-in value on a used PS3 at the likes of GameStop here in the U.S.A. is down to the $50 - $80 range. So if someone were wanting to trade in their PS3 towards new stuff anyways this is a great offer,
Now the oddity to this though is, what happens to the PS3's traded in to Microsoft?
Well, there is a very, very, strange rumor that has been circulating about the PS3 in general since last summer. GameStop began doing something unheard of at that time, which was brought to my attention by a GameStop employee. Back then, GameStop began a strange new internal policy of informing their employees to accept trade-ins on PS3's at full trade value regardless of the system's functional condition. All traded-in PS3's are then shipped to GameStop's main warehouse for "reconditioning". Since this policy began it has been noted that the original, launch model, systems are completely absent from GameStop stores. This is significant for two major reasons.
Reason 1: The original models possessed the one-hundred core IBM CPU developed exclusively for Sony for use in the PS3 at an investment cost of one-billion U.S. Dollars.
Reason 2: Well known fact that very shortly after the PS3 was released the U.S. Navy's R&D Department purchased over one hundred PS3's and successfully built an experimental node-based supercomputer from them which they then stated was going too save them thousands of dollars over the cost of simply buying a supercomputer, and gave them expandability since each PS3 was itself configured as a node and all communicated through ethernet networking.
If you put those two bits of info together, it's not at all out of the field of reasoning to assume that either a government or major corporation (like Microsoft) is sapping up all of the PS3's hanging loose in consumer hands for the purpose of building budget super computers.
Last edited by
Tweeg on Wed Feb 5, '14, 3:25 am, edited 1 time in total.