It's a combination of all the above. But, doing these refreshes can cause problems in the future. You'll upgrade the hardware so often. To the point of everything being perfect. Consumers could stop buying faster. Because it became good enough. Yeah, 4K is perfect. I don't need anything else. Those graphics look the same. Why do I need this new thing? Diminishing returns will accelerate.

Sure, but we have ps4 slim and XBox One S for that. The pro was practically launched next to the ps4 slim. The reason for the slim is to make money, the reason for the pro is to keep the core user happy.

I'm surprised double dipping is winning in the poll as the margins on the pro and the scorpio are likely very slim to maybe even non existent. That's a lot of R&D to make back while the systems themselves sell at close to production cost. The 360 Elites, ps3 slims, XBox One S are already serving the double dipping market. Pro and Scorpio will make some money, yet nothing compared to the much more juicy margins and sales numbers of their cost reduced siblings.

4K is the new buzzword and much easier to show off improvements. It's also much easier to render games in a higher resolution than go from 30 to 60 fps. Nothing is stopping devs from doing that on pro and scorpio, yet screenshots still rule. And exactly because 4K monitors aren't that mainstream yet, consoles have the unique opportunity to one up PCs at this point in time, especially with HDR. In a straight comparison consoles will always lose to PC.

If you mean like price to price comparison, then of course. But still, I don't think they are competiting against PC. Even if we take away framerate, the enhancements isn't exactly there either at say 1080p and most certainly not at checkerboarding apart from resolution enhancements... The fact that Sony themselves are bearly even caring about visual enhancements at 1080p and more focused on just being able to checkerboard to 4k makes me doubt their main objective is to compete with PC and not 4k it up...

Oh and I am still waiting to see how Scorpio will handle enhancements before commenting on that.

Other - consoles are low budget laptops now, not state of the art tech.
If Sony was like it was with PS3, we would see 4.2Tflop 599$ PS4 in 2013.

For Sony, an effort to sell their 4K TVs and their VR. Since VR needs twice the frames per second, it's obvious that the PS4 pro went with almost exactly twice the graphics power to execute this

For Microsoft on the other hand, it's more to keep up with their competition, both on the console market with the PS4 Pro and from Gaming PCs. While the latter is certainly also a reason for the PS4, it's probably far from being a focus point.

But to keep up with PCs is a botched attempt for both of them. The Jaguar was intended as an Ultra Low Power consumption chip and it clearly shows, as it's acting like a handbrake even on the base models already. It's limited amount of calculations it can output also means that 60fps would be too overwhelming for it most of the time as the CPU would also need to make twice as much calculations per second. The RAM hasn't been expended much or at all, which excludes higher detail and higher resolution textures than the base model. In other words, the upgraded hardware can't run faster or have shinier graphics than the base models, solely having to rely on higher resolutions to make a difference. Which is probably why Sony insisted that without a 4K TV you would be better off with the base model before the release of the Pro.

For both of them it is a double-edged sword. When PS5 and Xbox TWO (or whatever it will be called) roll out, will you buy them - or will you wait for the upgraded versions to come out? There will probably be quite a few who will hold back to wait for the better version, cutting off the initial sales of their next console. This as also happened before: The Megadrive/Genesis got both a CD and then the 32X upgrades before the Saturn rolled out. But people where vary about the upgrades and hold back on buying the saturn until they saw this was really their next machine and it's there to stay - at which point it was already miles behind the concurrence.

Nintendo is also hit by this. The 3DS got also a mid-term upgrade, just like the DS got with the DSi. The Switch will most probably follow that same route too. But on a handheld system, this seems to be more accepted, maybe because of the concurrence to the smartphones.

A big question in all those upgrades is if they will ever drop the support of the base model? Even though a handful of 3DS games are exclusive to the New 3DS, support of the base model never stopped totally. However, trying to play a recent 3DS game on a base 3DS is often rather painful. It runs, but with all kinds of issues. I fully expect this to happen to PS4 and Xbox ONE too in the future.

VR works fine on the base ps4 and as you said, the lack in real upgrade to the cpu doesn't help to double the frame rate. There's only 1 psvr demo that doubles the fps on pro (Trackmanio Turbo 120fps on pro). The GPU upgrade helps with reaching 1080p on psvr and increased detail.

I doubt many people that buy Pro and Scorpio now will hold off on the next gen for their mid-gen upgrade. Those are the people willing to spend launch price money again on an upgrade. The next gen upgrade should be bigger than a mid-gen upgrade, too tempting for early adopters to wait another 3 years. The people that waited until now to get a ps4/xb1 will still do the same, and likely still buy the cheaper model. I doubt much will chance besides the early adopters buying a new console every 3 years instead of every 6.

And sure, Sony wants to sell 4K tvs, which is likely why they added HDR to the base ps4 as well. They could have gone with an XBox One S type console, 4K UHD drive, superior upscaler, HDR and sold it cheap. The pro is here to look good against PC.

It's only a way to spur interest in their investment. If Sony wants to retain gamers in their ecosystem by releasing a more powerful version of their PS4, MS doesn't care if people migrates to PC or not. What we have here is two different approaches. They will hop on the 4K bandwagon because they don't want to be left behind, they will also hop on the VR bandwagon, on the game streaming bandwagon just like they hopped on the gesture controller bandwagon.

Create interest in their consoles by using newer technology available is imo the reason they create these mid gen consoles. If Sony didn't want people to migrate to PC they wouldn't release PSNow with PS4 games on PC. Same as MS wouldn't come up with the Play Anywhere program.

Ofcourse they care. XBL and PS+ are cash cows. Gamers that go to PC don't need to pay for online and can just as easily buy games without giving MS a cut in the windows 10 store.

Yet there's always more money to be made including PC as well. MS wants to promote windows 10, hence play anywhere. (which is just windows 10 + xbox one) Sony doesn't have an OS to promote, for them PS Now works. That can actually work anywhere and makes money on its own, while the best experience is still to be found on console.

I kinda agree that they want most people to pay for both PSN and XBLive because these services generate lots of money and the big goal here would be to convinve PC gamers to pay for these services... which I doubt will ever happen.

But let's not forget they make more money when people buy games and then buy DLCs than just paying for Xbox Live or PSN.

True, but only if they buy from the windows 10 store. (Unless it's 1st party ofcourse) Multiplat games sell very little on the windows 10 store, better to keep those gamers on the XBox One then trying to make money from them on the PC.