14th February 2024, 1:29 PM
(This post was last modified: 14th February 2024, 1:30 PM by Dark Jaguar.)
Sony meanwhile have their announcement. They sold twice as many consoles as Microsoft, and yet:
https://kotaku.com/ps5-playstation-5-lif...1851257227
They don't consider that a success. Granted, the Switch outsold all of it, but this article does point out that this generation has been... weird. No one could really even GET the things because of how hard it was for manufacturing during the chip shortage to come even close to meeting demand. While I do manage to have both myself, I couldn't actually recommend someone put in the effort hunting either one down back before 2023.
So, the "slow down" is notable. Of course, also notable is just how much money Sony basically burned in making "Spidersmin 2: Actually it's the Third one, but black sequels don't count". All the same, ending the generation a little over 3 years into the cycle (remember that both XBox Series and PS5 came out at the tail end of 2020) does seem rather hasty since by typical metrics, they're winning. Unless...
Well, unless the whole concept of "consoles" is about to make a seismic shift. Hey remember last year when rumors abounded from both MS and Sony sides that we'd be getting "Pro" versions of those consoles? I'm sure that it was something both of them were considering, but the vast majority of people who couldn't even find the original models did NOT want to deal with that mid-gen upgrade situation again. Heck even Nintendo bowed out of that sort of thing after making that "New 3DS" last handheld generation, with the "Switch Pro" not touching the specs and focusing on different user-facing features like battery life and the screen, so it was more of a "Switch SP". Sony, too, are running an x86 based console and the OS is a Unix based system (Linux itself forked from Unix's BSD release), so Sony could turn their console into a PC-in-a-box if they so wished to go that route, though the OS would need a lot more work than XBox's OS would to be fully compatible with, say, WINE. (Linux may have forked from UNIX, but it's added and changed so much over the years that things like WINE make specific system calls that don't exist on BSD UNIX.)
I'm speculating heavily at this point, admittedly, but it's a curious situation so forgive me that speculation for now. One last thing though. The chip shortage is still happening. It's been a rather long shortage and is projected to still take a bit to fully resolve.
https://kotaku.com/ps5-playstation-5-lif...1851257227
They don't consider that a success. Granted, the Switch outsold all of it, but this article does point out that this generation has been... weird. No one could really even GET the things because of how hard it was for manufacturing during the chip shortage to come even close to meeting demand. While I do manage to have both myself, I couldn't actually recommend someone put in the effort hunting either one down back before 2023.
So, the "slow down" is notable. Of course, also notable is just how much money Sony basically burned in making "Spidersmin 2: Actually it's the Third one, but black sequels don't count". All the same, ending the generation a little over 3 years into the cycle (remember that both XBox Series and PS5 came out at the tail end of 2020) does seem rather hasty since by typical metrics, they're winning. Unless...
Well, unless the whole concept of "consoles" is about to make a seismic shift. Hey remember last year when rumors abounded from both MS and Sony sides that we'd be getting "Pro" versions of those consoles? I'm sure that it was something both of them were considering, but the vast majority of people who couldn't even find the original models did NOT want to deal with that mid-gen upgrade situation again. Heck even Nintendo bowed out of that sort of thing after making that "New 3DS" last handheld generation, with the "Switch Pro" not touching the specs and focusing on different user-facing features like battery life and the screen, so it was more of a "Switch SP". Sony, too, are running an x86 based console and the OS is a Unix based system (Linux itself forked from Unix's BSD release), so Sony could turn their console into a PC-in-a-box if they so wished to go that route, though the OS would need a lot more work than XBox's OS would to be fully compatible with, say, WINE. (Linux may have forked from UNIX, but it's added and changed so much over the years that things like WINE make specific system calls that don't exist on BSD UNIX.)
I'm speculating heavily at this point, admittedly, but it's a curious situation so forgive me that speculation for now. One last thing though. The chip shortage is still happening. It's been a rather long shortage and is projected to still take a bit to fully resolve.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)