i am really struggling to understand how there can be a big enough market for this to make mass production justifiable, but i am sure that is a reflection on my perspective more than anything else
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it really doesn’t seem that crazy to me in this world where prices only ever go up (lol) and 5 days of food costs like $75, idk. the ps3 was eighteen years ago. the kids are physically unable to play 30fps games due to competitive shooters and precision soulslikes, they’d rather have N64 texture filtering than Good Graphics, so might as well also let them have good graphics.
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yeah, like, this is still less than it costs to build a computer with the lowest-end current gen Nvidia GPU. that’s a bit fucked, of course! but this is more about what a bad position consoles are in relative to current hardware because of AI compute / etc
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dialog options
bean counting: the price per flop is within 5% of the xbox series x
pc jerk: isn’t that like a 3070 from four years ago
had a ps3: at least for $599 it came with a disc drive
person: i hope to never spend seven hundred dollars on a game console
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the only response that annoys me personally is the one that presumes that consoles aren’t buying their GPUs from the same market and the same R&D pipelines and the same performance ballpark as PCs are… like… yes it’s annoying… but it is in no way unprecedented… you just waited as long as you could to find out
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“i only spend that much on my entry level cell phone”
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it is actually crazy how ok literally 100% of people are spending 700 american dollars on a cell phone. people be like ‘it’s just part of my phone bill, I don’t even notice it.’ oh, what’s your phone bill, 200 fucking dollars a month? I know where you work, bitch, you notice that.
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This is one thing that makes me feel like I live in a different universe. I recently had to replace my ancient, dying phone with a newer one. Both the old one back then and the new one now cost a little less than $90, which isn’t nothing but it’s nothing compared to what some of my friends and family spend on those things.
And I honestly can’t tell what other people’s expensive phones can do that mine can’t other than maybe a fancier camera. But you can get a very nice camera for less than the difference.
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It is an object most people touch more than literally anything else in their lives, a tool for finding and doing paid work, it’s a gateway to almost all social connection, an infinite source of entertainment and news, and has an extremely large amount of miscellaneous utility
Vs a giant leisure box that barely fits in an apartment that you need a big fancy tv to get anything out of where software to use with it is $70 on top of the monthly fee for basic functionality, and a controller you need to remember to charge every night
Yeah I wonder why people spend $700 on a phone but won’t on a game console. And the entry level phone of the fancier brand is $450, not $700. C’mon.
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also high end phones last about as long as console generations now even if a lot of the marketing is to the contrary
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Since the ps3 Sony has marketed themselves as a luxury consumer good like audiophile hardware when a huge part of the console audience is moms splurging a bit to make their kids’ lives in their trailers or uninsulated single-layer sheetrock apartments tolerable. It hasn’t killed the playstation yet but this time it might.
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they also backed off of this during the early PS4 era which was not a small part of why the PS4 was so hugely successful (sorry I am so pedantic about people saying “it has always been X” when actually it was XYX, and Y only looks insignificant against the trend), but consumer technology also briefly got much cheaper in the early 2010s due to a lot of downward pressure that has not been repeated
anyway, already had long conversation yesterday, Switch 2 has an easy road
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yeah, i engage with my phone in some capacity for 4-10 hours a day (i include listening to music and podcasts in this, which is typically the bulk of it). i play my switch maybe 4-6 hours most weeks. i play my ps5 much less, with rare exceptions. (i always buy a couple generations behind so i’ve never paid as much for a phone as i did my fucking ps5, but nonetheless)
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ok, but like. the thing is you listen to podcasts and send texts and check twitter and every phone is like ‘here is your 3nm SoC that is as powerful as a playstation 4, your 500 ppi amoled screen, also your phone bill is $80 a month if you don’t want to think about it, and headphones are an extra $100+.’ absolutely nowhere else in life are things that out of wack
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only GPU-wise! CPU-wise it’s like 4x as powerful (and more like 10x single threaded)
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pondering for a sec if i should go on a rant about performance being wasted for nothing in android ecosystem, but couldn’t be bothered to get riled up here, because it just doesn’t mean anything anymore in our world where mainstream CPUs get docked 15% due to fancyNameExploitForDesignFailureGoneWrong every year or so.
feeling 
today, indeed
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actually, self-fulfilling prophecy:
The barebones PS5 suddenly looks like a good deal by virtue of just being there. Who saw that coming, huh.
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The only person I know with a PS5 mostly plays Broforce on it. When I brought this up he said “I play other games, like God of War”, and he booted up God of War at the end of the night to prove it. Never saw him play God of War on it again.
The only other thing he’s tried to use it for is 4k blurays, and there seems to be a bandwidth bottleneck somewhere because the sound would frequently cut out on his setup.
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If you think long and hard …
The PS5 is a good Armo(u)red Core 6 Machine.
Add Eldenring to that, and Dragons Dogma 2.
Hell, maybe even GT7 with the comedy patch that bounces cars 'round.
Starship Troopers 2 game, plus Astrobot… that’s a good lineup for spending a few months, isn’t it?
How much is a bag of doritos now? Or a used car? Or fuck, rent? I’d argue it’s really not out of whack, your strawman is just stuck in 2018
Most people don’t upgrade their phones to the latest model every year, despite what the commercials tell you
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