You're right about this. There was a lot of hate about that here as well.

Too bad, but at least that means that all text in games will be readable :P I played my PS3 with a 21" CRT and composite initially, and some games were true eyekillers.

Oh, ok! Well, there are in general two ways to get audio to an av-receiver. One thing you already discovered and the other is coaxial. Toslink (the one you discovered) is standard nowadays.

No matter which one does it...me personally I look at it as a bad thing to just basically cut off some of your potential sales like that. Just my opinion though nothing big lol.

This actually affects me because I play on my PC monitor and make the sound go throught the AV cables to my electric guitar amplifier.

Guess I'm going to have to get a digital optical coax to analog RCA audio converter.

If you can afford a PS4, then you can afford a nice TV. My girlfriend and I bought a 32" Philips HDTV (1366x768 max res, though, 1080p is pointless at this size), and it only cost 280 Euros.

I find it funny that MS got a bunch of flak when it showed only HDMI connections, yet no one has said anything about it on PS4 really.

Guess WiiU is only one still supporting older connections if needed. Glad they gave the HDMI as the default though.

Well, there are times... I think it's good to cut off old technique at some point to reduce costs. Apple for example really cuts out old stuff fast. PCs had serial ports and parallel ports for ages, consumer-products nowadays don't. MS is requiring internet, others don't. These are things that happen and there will always be people complaining about it. Well, the internet-thing is perhaps not really appropriate but I think there will be even more things in future that need internet, even though many people still don't have it.

As if would be surprising to you :)

HDMI is both silly. optical out would only be used if you want to skip TV for sound and go directly to receiver.