On the PS4 and XBox One, Sony made $18 profit off each console, Microsoft made $28 profit.
But the BOM was significantly lower and under $500.
The surface pro BOM is significantly under their retail cost again.
They may be making a loss on the overall cost of marketing and promotion, but they certainly don’t make a loss on BOM costs.
This units BOM has to be around 1k, perhaps a bit under, but I don’t see them going for £500 retail.
Hmm I am intrigued by that because I saw some internal documents (granted back in 2009) when I worked for MS that showed some loss comparisons as they were assumed to stack up against Sony. Interestingly the presentation was at great pains to explain repeatedly that they had no accurate figures on Sony internal costs... I think they were terrified it get out and they be accused of any kind of collusion and on another side note, you wouldn't believe the sheer volume of internal tools and lab builds that are available but not made public because lawyers hadn't vetted them/said no).
To be fair though, they had in there things like their own licensing costs for e.g. DVD playback, shipping and labour costs for build etc so it was an overall comparison not based just on the hardware.
I'd also suspect that over time as they ramped up production the costs overall dropped - costs and popularity drive bell curves in opposite directions.
If they're making that much on each unit now, though, that is an impressive turnaround.