Disc Drive for $80 and the stand for $30 on top of the $700 console. Hard to see a good reason not to spend or save a bit more on a stronger PC or GPU rather than a console. The annoying thing is companies removing stuff from their products and then selling them separately.
I don't want to go down the PC vs. Console rabbit hole as I think folks are generally familiar with the basic arguments on each side, and mostly set in their ways regardless, but certainly the 4070Ti-level pricing does further those conversations. Ultimately I think that PS5 Pro is a fairly niche product for folks who are both tech conscious
and invested in the console ecosystem. The baseline PS5 offers the superior value proposition and will remain both the more commercially important model and still capable of delivering remarkable visual and entertainment experiences, including the
Astro Bot which launched for the system just a few days ago.
PS5 launched in 2020 with both disc and digital-only SKUs available. With the Slim revision, Sony took the opportunity to eliminate the manufacturing differences between these two models, such that the disc model is now literally an all-digital model with one of the faceplates removed and a disc module put in its place. That both optimised production costs on the Sony side, while also offering owners of the all-digital system an upgrade path to integrate a disc drive later if they chose to do so. Despite this change in hardware configuration, on the retail side Sony continues to offer both disc and all-digital SKUs for consumers to choose from. It's only with PS5 Pro that they're no longer offering a disc-equipped SKU at retail. I wish things were otherwise, but I suspect that PS5 Pro being a relatively niche model in the first place made the economics of maintaining two distinct SKUs for it unattractive, while the already high price of the system, coupled with the sales data and usage telemetry that Sony undoubtedly has access to, mitigated against including the drive in the baseline package. I don't
like those choices, but I think we can understand them.
Clearly physical media is slowly dying on consoles just as it did on PC all those years ago, and it will be a sad day when that eventually happens. But in the here and now, one benefit of having a disc drive is the ability to play 4K Blu-Rays that remain the gold standard in terms of home video quality. That capability is gone from PC. I don't mean that you have to buy an internal or external drive, I mean that you simply can't do it: Intel removed the features from their CPUs required to jump through all the security hoops of that format some generations back, while AMD never integrated them in the first place. My understanding is that 4K Blu-Rays can be ripped and re-encoded on PC by various complicated means, but that one cannot simply put a disc in an internal or external drive and watch the film. Given that 4K Blu-Ray is almost certainly the last physical format, the final means by which consumers can actually
own a film, rather than renting it from a streaming service, there is value in Playstation 5 still being part of that ecosystem, however much Sony is chipping away at it, whereas PC is simply not.
