Kaz Hirai: "About One Million" PS3s for 2006 in US

Sony clarified today that the "1.2 million PlayStation 3s in 2006" number that's been tossed around the media for the last month or so is not and has never been set in stone.

Next-Gen has a new interview with SCEA head Kaz Hirai, on which the PlayStation potentate pontificates on all things PS3.
He says:

For day one, we are going to have a total 400,000 units for the launch period only for North America, and we expect to have about one million units by the end of the calendar year.

Emphasis mine. Was this, I wondered, a change in plans? Previously on Next-Gen (and elsewhere, of course) it had been reported that there would be exactly 1.2 million units by the end of 2006 in North America.

Wondering about the discrepancy, I emailed Sony's corporate communications chief Dave Karraker, and he says...

The number has always been 1 to 1.2
million. Some media quote the higher figures, others quote the lower.
One million is what I have personally been saying. Nothing has changed in the quantities.

And he's not kidding: he was saying this, as evidenced in this MTV News article from early September. So apparently we should be figuring one million total units for 2006, with the possibility of up to 200K more units if the stars align correctly and the creek don't rise.

Other revelations in the interview indicate that there'll be "about 20" launch day games, which is pretty healthy. Oh, and there's this triumph of PR:

What we don’t do however is have a brand name for the network service, you know, like PlayStation Online or PlayStation Live, and this is because we don’t see a “PlayStation offline”.

Zing.