Yeah, as a hardware engineer this feels like porn to me but I also feel the whole thing is overengineered and expensive to design and build(for consumer electronics) versus Microsoft who drew a box in AutoCad and called it a day saving tons in R&D, tooling, materials and manufacturing which is how most hardware projects are ran nowadays in this industry since at that kind of scale the small things add up quickly, eroding your already razor-thin margins but maybe Sony has enough money to bankroll this project.
You can also notice the difference in cooling design. Sony has 2 heatsinks, a large and complex heatsink on the top with many heatpipes for cooling the APU and a small heatsink on the back for cooling just the VRMs stuck to the backplate with its own heatpipe(holy cow!) while XBOX is just a large copper plate with aluminum fins saving Microsoft tons in materials and build cost but they had better done their math right to make sure that it will be enough.
Sony had balls to go this route, I'll give them that. Respect.
I suspect Sony didn't penny pinch since they plan to make most of their money back from sales of games and services(ala Apple) while Microsoft probably wants to make more from the hardware itself(ala Android devices).
I have no dog in this fight, but my favorite part is the PS5 consumer friendly expandable storage via M.2 PciE drives(Yeeey!) vs the XboX overpriced and proprietary SSD cartridges(Booo!).
> Microsoft probably wants to make more from the hardware itself(ala Android devices).
This is pretty much the opposite of their stated strategy, which is to make money off services like Game Pass by ensuring that the consoles are accessible and all of their first-party games work across multiple generations / levels of consoles [0].
The PS5 was reportedly "considerably" more expensive before xbox announced their price [1], and Sony has been clear that game prices will go up for next gen and they're not focusing on cross-generation compatibility, so I do believe you're right that Sony at least expects to get it back on the games.
Microsoft shot themselves in the foot by announcing pricing first if true. Not that I'm complaining. $300/500 and monthly options to boot is very consumer friendly. The hype over the proprietary memory card is overblown. I'm sure either Microsoft will release a compatible adapter that takes any m2 drive and or a Chinese factory will make them and sell them on Amazon.
PS5 drives must also be pre-approved by Sony, supposedly due to strict hardware requirements, like 5.5GB/s[1] sustained bandwidth. I personally think it's silly, sure, bigger numbers mean better performance but I would be surprised if most games wouldn't work perfectly fine with a nowadays average SSD.
Ah no ps5 and xbox both have been designed for fast loading of game textures. Even the new nvidia and amd cards support the same so current games might be okay with slower drives but texture loading has been a bottleneck for 4k gaming which this solves.
With the original Xbox, they used hard drive locking that made it difficult to swap out to a new one. Its been a very long time since I've done it, but I seem to remember having a hard drive powered by a normal ATX PC, then swapping the data cable over from the PC to the Xbox while it was still on to achieve a HDD upgrade (with other steps in the middle that i've all but forgot).
It was a hassle for the 360 as well, you had to plug the drive into a PC first and run a homebrew tool to "bless" the drive so that it would work with the console
The proprietary memory card is going to be necessary for storing/accessing new titles designed to make use of their Velocity Architecture, any old external will do for games Xbox One or back-compatible games.
Not sure why they didn't enable storage tiering for regular external HDDs.
It would be far faster to move a game from external HDD back to the Velocity SSD before playing than to download the entire game again from the internet.
> Not sure why they didn't enable storage tiering for regular external HDDs.
They did: "A USB 3.1 drive can also carry Xbox Series games as storage, which can be transferred to Series X or S's internal SSD or Storage Expansion Card to then be played."
During the last gen consoles, Sony folks have said on camera how they were quietly cheering when MS announced a price point way above what the PS4 was targeted at.
Maybe Sony expected MS to aim higher again, and this time it was MS who undercut.
> This is pretty much the opposite of their stated strategy, which is to make money off services
I’m sure their internal strategy is to make money on the hardware, software and services. Basically everything. As Apple has shown, it’s not necessarily the worst plan.
> Microsoft who drew a box in AutoCad and called it a day
I actually like the simplicity of their design. The white one has a bit of Dieter Rams in it. The black tower is just that.
Form must follow function and the console itself has few simple functions: to house and properly cool the computer inside, and to make it easily accessible for repair and upgrades. It's hardly surprising it has few simple lines.
OTOH, the PS5 has a lot of lines to disguise a huge heat exchanger. It's not obvious how to even power it on.
The Xbox design looks classy but uninspiring. I like that. You can sit it under your tv and it will blend in with the style of most rooms.
The ps5 is designed to be eye catching which I think is a mistake because most people probably don't want a game console to be the centre of attention in the room.
I'm sorry, what planet are you guys on where gamers don't want attention-grabbing hardware? Not on the one with the rest of us where all "gaming" branded stuff has garish lighting I guess.
The time difference between regular and slim consoles being released has been pretty much spot on 3 years for all consoles, on all generations going back 20 years. If Sony releases a slim PS5 "a year later" that would be unprecedented.
They are, if they have a job. Not being sarcastic, it's just that 500 euros/ dollars is an ok amount for a piece of entertainment that will last a few years, so they will buy it now even if they are not playing all day long.
Your average "gamer" according to the industry's own statistics is a 25-29 male, owns one of the consoles, and buys exactly 3 games a year - Fifa, CoD, and one other action game. Maybe 4 if it's a good year. It's definitely not your stereotypical "gamer" type buying RGB everything - so yeah, I would guarantee that this kind of average gamer does not care about their "gear" being attention grabbing.
I’m not sure how scarcity during launch is relevant to this particular discussion. The design of the console, which was the original issue discussed here, will be the same whenever the console becomes widely available.
On the other hand I agree that looks won’t be the deciding factor for any potential buyer - casual or not.
I agree that this feels like a critical misstep. Casual gamers will not want an over the top design in their living room. Maybe they are intentionally ignoring that market with this generation, but I was thinking of upgrading my PS3 and am having second thoughts because this thing is, well, a bit silly looking. It looks like a movie prop for a sci-fi film.
PS4 was perfect in that regard IMHO. It was an interesting enough shape to by cool when you actually looked at it, but anonymous enough that you didn't even notice it when not looking at it.
Thought the exact same thing. I am a huge fan of the Xbox designs. The white one specifically reminds me of an upright Dieter Rams designed Braun turntable [1].
...and as I finish typing the section above I find this [2]. Looks like someone else already had the idea.
This generations designs are really weird to me, the PS5 does not feel like part of the same design lineage as PS2 and 4 (I always considered 3 the weird outlier and the ugly one). Honestly looks more like a descendant of the XB360 language. Feels such a strange departure when the PS4 had such a beautiful and striking design from aesthetics, brand and functionality.
From purely aesthetics I do think the new Xbox is the better looking and more modern looking machine, although the gigantic PS5 heatsink is going to help a lot with noise.
Probably speaks to the different strategies at play. The Xbox is being treated almost as a piece of commodity hardware to run GamePass on, PS5 the device is much more the star of the show. No strong opinion on either approach but does explain a lot of the design decisions.
> my favorite part is the PS5 consumer friendly expandable storage
This is a pattern, the PS3 and PS4 both had end-user accessible bays which contain a 2.5" HDD. Any drive can be formatted even from blank using the console's safe mode.
> the XboX overpriced and proprietary SSD cartridges
This is also a pattern. The original Xbox and Xbox One had internal hard drives that were not end-user serviceable. The Xbox 360 used 2.5" HDDs in cases. The original 360 drives had a special port on the cases, for whatever reason. The 360 S/E drives used regular SATA connections, it's plainly obvious looking at one that the connector is just the edge of a 2.5" HDD.
Same with the PS2 as well, all you needed was the network adapter and you can pop in a standard 3.5” IDE hard drive. You can even get a 3rd party boot disc to copy/load games off the hard drive to improve load times.
Sony is an electronics engineering company, and it really shows. The quality, forethought and care put into creating this product is part of their tradition. Microsoft, while doing wonderful things to make software more accessible is not an engineering company, and that shows too.
I only hope Microsoft has tested their cooling solution better than the 360 era. I don't want another RRoD situation.
I guess it depends on the media center? Many have no back panel so they are not an enclosed space. In terms of airflow you can think of them as small server racks.
Yeah? Looks like we do have numbers now and its just under 6" so I guess it'll be ok. I thought it was closer to 7" which would start to get pretty tight.
> they plan to make most of their money back from sales of games and services(ala Apple)
I thought Apple seems to do the opposite: they constantly raise iPhone prices while cutting features that increase manufacturing cost (eg. replacing the headphone jack with an empty hole large enough to fit a lightning→3.5mm dongle), and I’ve heard Apple fans argue here, I think more than once, that Apple is able to offer less profiteering (more privacy friendly) software because they make so much on hardware.
I agree. That’s why I think they do “penny pinch” on hardware (in certain areas) and don’t need to “make […] money back” on software, but take what they can get there anyway.
If your going to make money on the backend via services then there is no point in cheaping out on hardware. You make money by having more customers, in a competitive marketplace this means that you need to be the best, a distant #2 won't make you anything once you start needing to offer incentives to both keep customers on your platform - and keep developers onboard.
The pitch is presumably that it's the cheapest way to play. In fact MS looks to be pretty interested in chasing that same streaming dream as Google Stadia and others are.
There's a spot to store removed screws in the base! I don't even play games but I want a PS5 based off of this teardown. It's so heartwarming to see a manufacturer encouraging modifying hardware these days. I'm sure there's guides incoming on how to add Noctua fans and liquid metal paste to the heatsink.
Yeah, the part that really did it for me was when he snapped off the top plate and there was an empty M.2 slot just sitting there.
Also, the blower fan is interesting. Though, like you said, there is a lot of stuff in there to push air through, plus dust filters (yay!), so it probably made sense to go with static pressure over pure volume of airflow.
> XBOX is just a large copper bottom with aluminum fins saving Microsoft tons in materials and build cost but they had better done their math right to make sure that it will be enough.
Early indications are not great[0]. Granted, the most noticeably hot part of a system should be the exhaust.
Yeah, ultimately the complaints there just demonstrate a failure to understand why a game console would be hot. If it's using 200W it's going to dump 200W worth of heat one way or another. No cooling solution will fix that if the device is just producing more heat than can possibly be dissipated in a pleasing way.
In that sense, maybe the PS5 will have an advantage here by being large, because there's more surface area to work with so it won't feel like a little furnace, even if both consoles end up having no thermal problems (in terms of the chips overheating, etc)
Claims that the console is toasty even while idle are suspicious, though. It really shouldn't be drawing that much power while idle, so I hope that's not true at launch. So much hardware has this problem though... my macbook's USB C dock is almost a fire hazard with how warm it gets even when it's not in use.
> suspect Sony didn't penny pinch since they plan to make most of their money back from sales of games and services(ala Apple) while Microsoft probably wants to make more from the hardware itself(ala Android devices).
When I saw how nice everything looked my first thought was that they’re going to release an updated “slim” console in, like, a year after launch that cuts a lot more corners. They get lots of hype to encourage sales up front by packing a ton of value in the launch model. That encourages more people to buy into the ecosystem and then they launch a future one that designed with higher margins in mind.
Sony has always done that with their first version of their console. As they expect to die shrink to 5 or 3nm down the road for much better thermals. Along with other redesign that makes manufacturing less expensive.
And both company are not making much if anything from Hardware. The profits are all in games. That is part of the reason why Games is getting more expensive with every gen.
We need some real innovation to help driving Game development cost down, especially with respect to Graphics.
I think purely from an industrial design point of view, Microsoft’s entire Surface line (laptop, tablet, headphones etc.) are all very intricately designed.
> XboX overpriced and proprietary SSD cartridges(Booo!).
Which is incredibly ironic given how long it took Sony to adopt standard storage devices in the past. I think they were literally the last camera manufacturer to support CF and SD cards.
First thing I did after buying a PS4 Pro late-cycle was replace the internal HDD with a (bog-standard, massive, cheap) SSD. Considering how fast my games tend to load, I honestly wonder how the PS5 benchmarks compared to my SSDified PS4 Pro.
A benchmark is going to be an order of magnitude faster, because it's not using SATA.
But more importantly the big goal of building in the SSD is so that games can be designed with no load times, which beats any loading time number you can hit.
> the on-board SSD of the PS5 with hardware compression should load at 44Gbps
You sure about that number? That would be close to 2X faster SSD than Apple uses in new MBPs and they are already insanely fast compared to most SSDs. Would love a source if you have it.
You answered your own question. The PS is doing hardware compression which will effectively increase your bandwidth by your compression ratio. 2:1 isn’t that hard to believe.
1) the link doesn’t say 2:1 compression now, but rather 1.5:1 with more in the future. Where I obviously made an error in judgment was assuming this was from previously compressed textures, where as this seems it’ll be the way to initially compress the textures. Great results, just hadn’t thought about it that way, silly me.
2) it doesn’t matter anyway, the SSDs actual read speed is 5.5GB/sec (aka 44Gbps) raw performance. About the only mass market consumer targeted drive I know of (could be others of course) that’s faster is the one I mentioned in a sibling comment (Sabrent M2 Gen4 tops out at 5GB/sec for example) Further, without having heard officially myself, I believe this confirms its PCIe 4.0 bus internally (which wouldn’t be surprising given other specs I know), as if memory serves PCIe 3.0 can’t get that high.
The PS3 was well after the ship had sailed. That’s the whole point, it took them 3 generations to stop. The PS1 and 2 both required custom memory cards as well when the original Xbox was using a standard SATA drive.
You might be misremembering reality - yes, the original xbox shipped with a normal drive, but the X360 had a proprietary drive in a custom enclosure, but actually the most popular model didn't come with any drive at all - just a proprietary memory card. Then the Xbox One has a regular sata drive, but I wouldn't call it "user replaceable" - it's very hard to access and requires a complete disassembly of the console, while on PS3 and PS4 all you needed to do was remove one screw and the drive would come out. The same seems to be true on PS5 again.
You can also notice the difference in cooling design. Sony has 2 heatsinks, a large and complex heatsink on the top with many heatpipes for cooling the APU and a small heatsink on the back for cooling just the VRMs stuck to the backplate with its own heatpipe(holy cow!) while XBOX is just a large copper plate with aluminum fins saving Microsoft tons in materials and build cost but they had better done their math right to make sure that it will be enough.
Sony had balls to go this route, I'll give them that. Respect.
I suspect Sony didn't penny pinch since they plan to make most of their money back from sales of games and services(ala Apple) while Microsoft probably wants to make more from the hardware itself(ala Android devices).
I have no dog in this fight, but my favorite part is the PS5 consumer friendly expandable storage via M.2 PciE drives(Yeeey!) vs the XboX overpriced and proprietary SSD cartridges(Booo!).