More teeth!

I guess what I'm saying is that they had a chance to make the PS5 Slim look better than the launch edition, but instead, this:

I ask you...

Or, more accurately, they released
it to the scalpers and their bots. 

If you're someone who cares about such things, I urge you to reprioritize. But if you're like me, and simply can't help but dwell on the ill-advised design choices of a mid-life design refresh of a game console, I hope you'll join me in asking: "what the actual?" If you don't know what I'm on about, cast your mind back to the lockdown days of the pandemic, when, despite being woefully ill-equipped to manufacture enough consoles, Sony went ahead and released the PS5 to gaming public, all of whom salivated at the prospect of an incremental at best improvement in graphics over the PS4.

"We wanted something that would make
gamers say 'really? You went with that?'"

-Sony

But even if one was able to secure one, at a substantial mark-up, one was met with the difficult decision of where to put it. It was, after all, too large and too heavy for the average flat-pack TV stand. A pain? Absolutely. But one we could live with. After all, all that weight and volume just meant more bits, right? What was not forgivable, was the utterly baffling design choice. The exterior of a game console doesn't really matter in the grand scheme, but the idea that someone laid a bunch of design options in front of a Sony exec and this is the one they chose defies all explanation.

"What are you going to do? Buy an 
Xbox? Pfft...that's what I thought..."

-Playstation President Jim Ryan

Of course, many of us swallowed our aesthetic misgivings and bought one--hopefully not from a scalper--secure in the knowledge that Sony routinely walked back their weird designs with the inevitable "Slim" version. It happened with the PS2, the PS3 (twice) and the PS4. But with the reveal of a PS5 Slim that defiantly retains the weird, flared top, curved surfaces, and fins of the original, the company's has said in a clear voice that it doesn't in any way care what anyone on Twitter or whatever thinks.

And I can respect that. There's a nobility to it. It would be like that time we saw the pre-release footage of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie and everyone freaked out, but instead of re-doing the CGI, the effects team just leaned into it.

"Everyone hates it? You know what? More. Teeth. More."

-Sonic the Hedgehog's animators