Sony Announces Two New Versions of PlayStation 4: One Slimmer, Other More Powerful (engadget.com)

Sony isn't done with the PlayStation 4. The company today revealed the PS4 Slim, a thinner version of its latest console that's been lurking around the rumor mill for months now. The Slim lands on September 15th for $300. The PS4 Slim features all the guts of a standard PS4 plus a few cosmetic and convenience upgrades, including a lightbar at the top, more space between the front-facing USB ports and the removal of the optical port, Engadget reports. From the report:The console is about 30 percent smaller than the standard PS4, which came out in 2013, and it plays all existing PS4 games.
The company also launched a more powerful version of the PlayStation 4: the PS4 Pro, which offers support for 4K. It is priced at $399, and goes on sale November 10. The Verge reports: The PS4 Pro can output 4K and HDR video, which is powered by an upgraded GPU. Sony also boosted the clock rate for the new PS4 Pro. It will also come with a 1TB hard drive. "PS4 Pro is not intended to blur the line between console generations," Mark Cerny, the chief architect for the PS4, said on stage. "Instead, the vision is to take the PS4 experience to extraordinary new levels."

Comments

Hardware - and customer - fragmentation

[Somebody Is Using My]

Isn't this move sacrificing one of the major advantages of owning - and developing for - a console, which is its standardized hardware? As a customer, being sure that any Playstation 4 game I buy will run on my platform without difficulties is a big plus over the uncertainty of trying to get that same game running on a PC. Similarly, as a developer, I can max out the platform's capability without worrying that some players are going to have a substandard experience because their GPU isn't up to snuff (also, I don't have to worry as much about compatibility testing because the platform is standardized). But now Sony has introduced two different tiers to the customers.

If I own an older, slower PS4, am I going to miss out on some games because my hardware can't hack it, or - even if the game is nominally compatible - am I going to have to play with poor framerates or worse graphics effects? Or is Sony going to insist developers limit themselves to the capabilities of the older hardware, in which case what advantage is there really to buying the PS4 Pro if games are going to target the lowest common denominator anyway? Meanwhile, as a developer I would hate this because now I either have to target and test against two different hardware configurations.

Consoles used to be the ultimate in plug-n-play gaming. The way things are going, playing a game on a console is going to be as troublesome as on a PC.

Re:IT'S THINNER!

[WolfgangVL]

I'm here to slim down and remove headphone ports.... and I'm all outta headphone ports.

Re:No 4K UHDBlu-Ray player?

[Anubis IV]

While it struck me as baffling too, now that I've thought about it some more, I'm inclined to think that it honestly shouldn't have come as a surprise. 4K blu-rays entered the race late, stumbled out of the gate, and found that they were not only entering a market in rapid decline, they were doing so without the benefit of the factors that allowed their predecessor to enjoy a middling level of success.

The fact that the Xbox S supports 4K blu-rays does nothing to change the situation at large, since it's a mid-cycle console upgrade that flew by the majority of the public without them even realizing it had happened. There's virtually no chance of it changing the situation that drove Sony's decision.

Mind you, this is much to my chagrin, since I'm still in the habit of buying physical media and making high quality rips of it so that I can control where and how I view it, but it's pretty clear that Sony has looked at the sales numbers for 4K discs up to this point, seen that they've failed to turn the tide of declining sales, and have decided that it's not worth the couple of extra bucks per console to support a format that will never manage to gain traction in the market at large.

================

Just to break things down a bit more, since I realize I said a lot of things without explaining what I meant...

Sales Decline
Even though blu-ray won the format war over HD-DVD, blu-ray sales have been declining for about five years, with the decline hitting double-digit percentages for the last three years straight. It's a format in falling-off-a-cliff levels of decline, despite no physical successor displacing it. DVD sales are down by a similar amount. On the flipside, streaming is up. WAY up. The writing is on the wall for physical media, and has been for some time, whether we like it or not.

Beneficial Factors
This is happening, despite the fact that blu-ray had every opportunity to succeed. Getting people to buy an expensive new TV would typically be a major hurdle, but the falling price of HDTVs around the time that blu-rays launched (coupled with the fact that massive, flatscreen HDTVs were a compelling upgrade over the bulky, small CRTs that everyone had at that point) helped drive an incredible adoption rate that far outpaced the typical upgrade cycle.

4K's Hurdles
In contrast, while 4K blu-rays have to cross that same hurdle of getting people to buy new TVs, we haven't seen 4K TV adoption move anywhere close to the same speed that we saw with HDTVs (i.e. it's on par with the typical replacement cycle). 4K TVs are proving to not be a compelling upgrade for most people over existing HDTVs, presumably because the benefits of UHD over HD are lost on most people.

Late Arrival and Competition
Moreover, YouTube, Netflix, and other streaming services have been providing 4K content (or higher) to the people who wanted it for years at this point, and they did so without requiring big ticket purchases of their users. The first 4K blu-ray discs didn't start shipping until March of this year, so the format was both late to the game and priced higher than its competition, meaning that it's, unsurprisingly, fared quite poorly in the market.

Other Moves
On the other hand, we've seen Sony work on making PlayStation Vue a more compelling service. When the Olympics were ongoing, I saw numerous mentions of it as a viable alternative to cable subscriptions and services like Sling TV. And this is in addition to Sony's ever-expanding, existing library of digitally distributed games and movies available in the PlayStation Store.

All of which is to say, between the market and Sony's other moves, it shouldn't have come as a surprise to us that this would happen, even though we might wish otherwise.

Re: Dropped optical port?

[jason777]

Some people have not upgraded their receiver to one that does hdmi. I connect devices to the tv via hdmi for video, but still use optical for audio to the receiver.