You cannot purchase a PlayStation this Holiday season

[EricHiggin]

the-pi-guy said:

Microsoft has been moving more production over to the Series S. I've noticed the ratio has changed from launch. And it's a lot easier to make Series S's. Microsoft can make almost twice as many Series S as Series X with the same amount of material.

The Series S has generally been easy to get throughout the past year. Whereas the PS5 and Series X sell out in minutes or seconds, the Series S has generally been in stock for dozens of hours at a time. Demand for the Series S has just been much lower, but it's a great holiday console.
So lower demand + increased production on Series S = greater availability.

MS has stopped making Xbox One, and Sony has stopped making PS4's to prioritize the newer consoles. They want to transition people onto the next console gen.

Even if MS can't buy more wafer allocation:

MS can just notify TSMC that they want less XBSX wafers made, and more XBSS. This would allow MS to make way more (XBSS) dies overall.

MS very well may have already made that decision leading up to the holidays, to make sure they had as much stock available as possible.

Having XBSS be reasonably available on the shelves is better than having extreme limited availability for both XBSS and XBSX.

SNY can't do squat about PS5 chips because there is only one chip design. All they can try to do is buy more wafer allocation, if they can.

PS4 chips are made on a different node, so it doesn't impact PS5 chip production at all.

Not sure about the assembly line though. Less PS4's could mean more PS5's, maybe.