Sony's Smaller PS5 With a Detachable Disc Drive Lands in November (engadget.com) 25
Sony announced new PlayStation 5 models that will likely be unofficially called the "PS5 Slim." From a report: The new model has the same horsepower on the inside, but it has a smaller form factor with an attachable disc drive and a 1TB SSD. The new model's detachable drive means you can buy the Digital Edition and change your mind later, essentially adding the drive as an $80 modular accessory. [...] Sony says the new PS5 has 30 percent lower volume, and its weight is 18 percent and 24 percent lighter than the original. The model with the disc drive will cost $500.
And as usual (Score:2)
It will be on sale from November and available from normal stores instead of scalpers around next November.
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It's just a PS5. Unless you're desperate for the new one, you can just get the older "fat" model and play PS5 games just fine.
So it's only a problem if you just happen to want a PS5 that somehow Sony has managed to make even uglier and even more clunky (if mounted horizontally).
Of course, the big F-U from Sony is that external drive only works with the PS5 slims. If you bought a digital only PS5, you c
Boring (Score:2)
It's still just a shitty PS5.
At least switch to cartridges (Score:2)
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It's still 10X cheaper to use discs. A 64GB microSD is still $9-10 which is amazing from a tech perspective but on a $70 game, that's 15% of cost. Also there is a price floor for anything made from NAND, it's very cheap but it'll never be "pennies" cheap to manufacture.
I can snag 50GB Blu Ray blanks for around $1-2 a disc and those are for home writer drives, the ones manufactured for the factory I have to imagine are even cheaper
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It's still 10X cheaper to use discs. A 64GB microSD is still $9-10 which is amazing from a tech perspective but on a $70 game, that's 15% of cost. Also there is a price floor for anything made from NAND, it's very cheap but it'll never be "pennies" cheap to manufacture. I can snag 50GB Blu Ray blanks for around $1-2 a disc and those are for home writer drives, the ones manufactured for the factory I have to imagine are even cheaper
And discs can just be stamped out. For an SD, you need to write and verify each and every one.
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True, the only company using carts is Nintendo with the Switch so I suppose the economics make sense for them but also lot's of Switch titles, especially first party ones never go on sale as cheap as Playstation or XBox titles a year out of print.
Also checking the size of something like Tears of the Kingdom and that is large by switch standards at 18GB but many games on PC and other platforms easily push up into 50, 60 sometimes over 100GB
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Sony invested waaaaay too much money into Blu-ray. They will do anything they can to keep that technology alive until they back a new standard - which will probably also be terrible again. Because every technology standard, especially related to storage, that they come up with is absolute garbage.
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Sony invested waaaaay too much money into Blu-ray. They will do anything they can to keep that technology alive until they back a new standard
Are you indicating that you know something about a more viable option? Others have made the point in the thread: Blu-Ray discs are about a fifth the cost of SD cards at retail; even with wholesale discounts, one would expect that disparity to roughly track at best, or favor Blu-Ray discs, more likely. I don't think Sony is likely to do this; they already allow aftermarket NVMe drives to be installed in a PS5, and they support USB connected hard drives as well. I don't think they're going to spend engineerin
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None of which is relevant.
Even if costs of SD cards did approach that of Blu-ray, Sony will never abandon Blu-ray. Not unless they have a hand in inventing what replaces it - whatever it might be. Blu-ray isn't even that good of a technology to begin with (HD DVDs were going to be sooo much better without requiring new hardware), but because it's Sony's baby they forced it down everyone's throats and, luckily for them, succeeded this time. They tried the same shit with Betamax, UMD, MiniDisc, Memory Stick..
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Optical discs are obsolete.
Correct. But irrelevant.
You're probably the last person on earth who still cares about Sony's long-forgotten format wars.
Incorrect. I just dislike all Sony technology and am old enough to remember all of it.
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Blu-ray isn't even that good of a technology to begin with (HD DVDs were going to be sooo much better without requiring new hardware)
How were HD-DVDs going to be "better"? They had much lower capacity than blu-ray, placing them at an immediate disadvantage for storage. This led to trade-offs for video too, because they relied on higher compression to fit all the HD data on the disc, and these algorithms are definitely not "lossless." I have no love for Sony or their business practices, but Bluray was superior from a technological perspective. So was Betamax BTW, which you also mentioned.
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Blu-ray is 17 years old now. Sony are probably amazed that it hasn't been superseded yet. I like physical discs, but they are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the face of digital game and movie downloads. At this point, there may never be a popular new disc standard.
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Their next storage probably won't be disc based. But Sony is gunna keep forcing Blu-ray to stay alive for as long as possible, unless they are leading the charge of whatever replaces it - disc or otherwise. That is just Sony's way. They've held on to tech that's dead on arrival for years. So, Blu-ray being successful means they are going to keep milking it any way they can, until it's dead dead.
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They don't get easily scratched, and people may have a bunch of PS4 discs lying around. Sometimes the disc version is cheaper or available used. Maybe you want to have some way to play Blu Rays or DVDs or even CDs on your TV. When the price difference is only $50, you might as well get the Blu Ray player. I agree that disc free is better for gaming, but we're still in something of a transitory state.
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A 4 GB Switch cartridge still costs a lot more to manufacture than a Bluray disc does. Hell, it costs more than 2 Bluray discs do. The costs go up significantly as the price goes up.
We've long past the point where the majority of sales are digital, even if you remove digital-only games from the analysis. We're far more likely to remove physical media completely than we are to go back to cartridges.
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why still deal with bulky discs that can get scratched
Why deal with cartridges that the dog can chew up? - and other non-problems we can think of.
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My dude, I have exactly one DVD that's ever failed, and it was a known manufacturing defect. Kentucky Fried Movie, for the record.
Otherwise every audio CD, every CD from back in the DOS days, on up, unless I've left them sliding around on the car floor with the gravel and dirt for a few weeks, has never failed.
How does the add-on drive connect? (Score:2)
If the add-on drive can be used with computers, I'd buy one just to be able to read Blu-Ray discs on the go. But it's Sony so I'm sure there's some maximum-effort "fuck you" engineering involved to put a stop to that. Potential demand be damned.
Speaking of mobile Blu-Ray, why is it that portable DVD players came in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and price points while portable Blu-Ray players are pretty much cheap-o grade half a level above what you'd find in a blister pack, hanging from a peg? There was like
Re: How does the add-on drive connect? (Score:2)
You can get a real BR drive for like $15 on Amazon. Why bother with the same drive mechanism in a Sony jacket?
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I see one for just over $40. I didn't know they were that cheap.
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Based on the pictures, it attaches by removing the bottom half of the side panel and attaching it in its place, leaving you with a PS5 that looks like the (new) standard model. It isn’t portable in the least.
Can the drive work with orig PS5 digital editions? (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure the straightforward answer is "no", but I'm wondering if it can be hacked in somehow? I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
Alternately, will Sony produce a version of the drive that can be added to the original PS5 digital edition?