PS5 Slim Is Coming This Winter – And I’m Underwhelmed
It's slim sure, but apparently there's no performance increase.
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Sony just dropped a nice quick 20-second teaser video on its official PlayStation YouTube channel announcing the PS5 Slim, right in the middle of all these Prime Day deals.
Yep, according to various sources, (and Sony themselves) we’re getting the “Same Immersive Power” in a new slim form-factor. It’s also going to be available in both a digital and disc variant as well. There’s some hint in the description that it’ll also see an upgrade to the internal storage with reference to “an ultra-high speed SSD” as well, although no actual detail on the specs of that just yet.
Slim Pickings – Rumored Specs
Three years on, and we’re finally getting a PS5 update. Admittedly it did take a couple years until you could actually buy an original Sony PS5 at a reasonable price, due to the chip crisis. Are there massive hardware changes? No, apparently not, it’ll feature the same immersive power, just a smaller form factor, and a slightly beefed up SSD. Wow…
I’m incredibly disappointed with this. Why? Just take a step back for a moment and look at the life-cycle of the last gen PS4, and you’ll understand. Sony’s PS4 launch date? November 2013, PS4 Pro launch date November 2016. We had three years of development time, and in that time Sony managed a huge increase in overall performance, moving from 1.84 teraflops of performance of the original PS4 up to an impressive 4.198 teraflops of processing power in the PS4 Pro, that’s well over double just on raw processing grunt. On top of that you also got 5GHz Wifi, Bluetooth 4.0, and a number of internal tweaks to memory and streaming capacities on top of all that, making the Pro a genuinely impressive purchase, even for former PS4 adopters.
To be clear, that was quite the improvement. But this time around? Well it’s slimmer I guess? Sony has at last given us some concrete specs for it, but you’ll be hard pressed to find them (you can check the PS5 Slim specs here). It does have a few extra features available, a vertical stand, a removable disc tray at extra cost for the digital version, and of course a 1TB SSD (which judging by the 5.5GB/s spec is a fairly early gen PCIe 4.0 SSD circa 2020). But given you can already upgrade the PS5’s SSD really easily, and for surprisingly little investment as well, it kinda makes that last point a fairly mute one. Particularly when you can pick up a 2TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD for cheap these days.
Who is the PS5 Slim for?
Honestly, at a guess, people who don’t have a PS5 already? Maybe because the original was too big? I’m just a disappointed parent, hoping from more from the hardware world. Fortunately it costs the same as the standard PS5 across the board ($500 USD, and $450 for the digital version) so that’s a relief at least. The big question will be how the smaller form factor affects cooling.
We’ll continue to update this article as the story develops...
