1. Moore's law dying means that older nodes are still very useful, so there's still lots of people bidding for capacity on these 8 or whatever year old foundry nodes who are willing to pay lots of money, meaning that base costs of the CPU and GPU haven't fallen as quickly as one would expect even in the absence of 2-4.

2. The Pandemic and then Russia's invasion of Ukraine screwed with supply chains quite a bit, and caused an inflationary spike.

3. Trump's tariffs affected the profitability of these consoles, and inserted a lot of uncertainty into them because nobody knows how the tariffs situation will evolve over time, or if Sony will get reimbursed or not for the illegal tariffs that were levied against them. The uncertainty and general animosity towards the USA has also caused the US Dollar to slump in value relative to a lot of currencies, which then pressures Sony to raise prices.

4. The current RAM, SSD, and GPU shortages caused by LLM hyperscalers is again spiking the costs of their components

I recall that the PS1 memory cards used flash memory that was just invented in 1994.

Significant pain is coming as fallout from the Iran war as well.

The price of raw plastic from our plastic mold houses has tripled recently as there's a shortage of raw input....