Rumor: Limited 60GB PS3 supplies

I have to give credit for this story to the guys over at Joystiq, but it was something I had to post about. There is a possibility that the 60GB PS3 on sale for $500 is for a limited time only and that once all 60GB PS3 stock has sold out the line will be discontinued, leaving only the $600 80GB PS3.

Joystiq originally posted this rumor as fact but later retracted it when Sony's Dave Karraker contacted them to say they were wrong. But Karraker's quotes don't seem so straight forward to me.

Originally, Sony's European president David Reeves was the one who foretold the end of the 60GB PS3. He was answering questions about why Europeans weren't getting the $100 off like the United States. Reeves said that Europe didn't have enough 60GB PS3 stock and that once all 60GB stock was sold, only the 80GB PS3 would be sold(the 60GB PS3 going the way of the 20GB PS3). He even said flat out that Americans would only be able to buy the 80GB PS3 once all the 60GB PS3s in the US sold out and that the reason for the price drop was to get rid of all the 60GB PS3s.

Now Karraker comes out to put the spin on Reeves statements saying "We have ample supplies of both models to meet the needs of our consumers for the foreseeable future." But that doesn't say that it's forever. Is the foreseeable future a month? A year? How long?

I did some more digging around and found an interview with Sony's president Kaz Hirai at VG TV. The site and interviewer are in a different language, but Hirai's answers are in english. About 1:43 into the clip, Hirai says "Well, again, just from a hardware perspective, the $499 price adjustment that we did for the 60 GB version for the American market, uh we're no longer in production for that product so once that product is gone from the retailers' shelves then we're back to the $599 SKU only so it's not like we have a two price strategy here in the US market which we found out very early on that consumers react mostly just to having one SKU as opposed to having two."

So it seems to me like all the overseas Sony management have no problem saying that the 60GB PS3 is done, but the American Sony branch is trying to keep it secret for a while longer. And as we know from pre-E3, Sony will lie to protect its secret announcements.