Sony finally pulled the shrink wrap off the PlayStation 5 Pro this week, and if you thought the base PS5 was hard to find in 2020, get ready for round two of grown adults fistfighting over cardboard boxes.
The new console lands November 7 at $699.99, which is a sentence I need to sit with for a moment.
Without a disc drive, because apparently physical media is the guy nobody invited to the party but who keeps showing up anyway.
Here's what your hard-earned money actually buys you.
A beefed-up GPU promising up to 45% faster rendering, a "PSSR" AI upscaling thing that sounds suspiciously like DLSS wearing a Sony-branded hoodie, and 2TB of storage so you can install roughly four modern games before the "storage full" notification starts haunting your dreams.
There's also ray tracing improvements, because nothing says "I have disposable income" like slightly shinier puddles in Spider-Man.
Sony's pitch is that this is for the "discerning gamer" who wants 4K at 60fps without choosing between pretty graphics and a framerate that doesn't feel like a slideshow.
Plenty of PS5 games still make you pick a performance mode that looks like someone smeared Vaseline on your TV.
The Pro supposedly fixes that, and early hands-on impressions suggest it mostly does, assuming you own a display that can actually show the difference.
But here's the part nobody at Sony wants to say out loud.
You need a 120Hz 4K TV with VRR and ideally HDMI 2.1 to get the full benefit.
If you're still rocking the 2016 Samsung you bought during a Black Friday fugue state, congratulations, you've just spent $700 to play the same games looking basically the same.
It's a mid-cycle refresh for people whose credit score can handle it.
The disc drive situation is its own comedy special.
If you want to play physical games, that's another $79.99 for the detachable drive, plus $29.99 for the vertical stand, because God forbid the thing stand up on its own without a proprietary piece of plastic.
Add a second DualSense controller and you're staring down the barrel of a $900 console.
That's a used Honda Civic's monthly payment.
That's a lot of money for slightly better shadows.
The internet, predictably, is handling this with the grace of a raccoon in a dumpster.
Half of X is screaming that Sony has lost its mind, the other half is quietly preordering and telling everyone else they're "not the target audience." Both groups are correct.
Scalpers are already doing their little goblin dance.
If you've got the TV, the disposable income, and a deep-seated need to play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth at a framerate that won't make you nauseous, sure, knock yourself out.
If you're a normal person with a normal TV and a normal budget, your regular PS5 is fine.
Final Thoughts
Honestly, the PS5 Pro feels less like a product and more like a stress test for how much Sony thinks you'll pay for "slightly better." The answer, based on preorder traffic, is apparently "yes, and please make it hurt." I'll be over here playing my dusty PS4 backlog until the price drops, which, given Sony's track record, should be around the time the PS6 leaks.