I think it's safe to assume that pages with Sony news will likely get less clicks that day than if there was was no Apple conference.
It's a natural reaction, in my opinion. Especially if Apple surprises people.

I guess it is true that some nations won't care as much as US will for a new iPhone. Personally I'll read Sony news first... Google would sway me though if it was same day as next Nexus device. Though idk, I'm expecting to not hear about Sony's event on any mass media beyond gaming sites such as this and neogaf. Whereas often there will be tidbits in late night television and other video media during their appropriate segments. I'm thinking I'll only hear about Apple during these couple of days.

I wonder if Sony is altering any of their marketing with this in mind?

Hmmm, a console that's sold 44 million units worldwide since launch 3 years ago, versus a phone that's sold 200 million units in the last year alone and which has about a BILLION active users.  There are a lot of people who give a crap about the new iPhone, probably more than any other device on the planet.  To be fair it is tempered by the fact that the iPhone is much more mass-market and the PS4 is somewhat more specialized (with the great success of the PS4 also comes a higher proportion of casual customers).  The logic you propose would imply that since Apple Watch has a dominant share of the smartwatch market, the world will be paying more attention to the Apple Watch 2 than the iPhone 7: I seriously doubt that.

I don't really think it's relevant. Mass media is rarely important for gaming hardware buzz. It is more significant for bad news. When the mass media picks up on bad news in gaming then you know there's a problem. But good news travels extensively and sufficiently within gaming media.

200M units?  Yes.  1B ACTIVE users?  Lol, no.  Apple makes quite a bit of their money from a lot of repeat buyers who MUST have the new iPhone every year.  That's not to downplay their success, cause 200M is still nuts.  I'm just saying ~1/7th of the world's population is not on iPhones.  They'd have WAY more marketshare than ~15% if that were true.

Probably not.  I'm sure they'll have all the gaming and tech sites there.  Plenty of vids on their Youtube channel.  Then, they may have a guest spot on the Tonight Shot w/ Jimmy Falon to show it off.

It will affect it for sure, but Sony should be fine.

Don't play with my heart!

The question isn't whether they were released the same week, it's whether they were announced the same day.  And even if they were, you're now contrasting hardware and software.  I don't think what you've listed is a parallel at all.

I've seen lots of mass media news stories about new gaming consoles, all the way back to the Nintendo hey-days of the mis-80s, and continuing on to almost every console launched since.  Heck, I remember news stories about Atari before that.

It's mass market success that has propelled Sony's success.  It was success with the mass market consumer (thanks to Spyro, Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, etc.) that propelled the PS1 past the Saturn and the N64.  It was mass market success that propelled the PS2 past the Xbox, Gamecube, and Dreamcast.  It was the Wii's mass market success (and to a lesser degree the Xbox 360's) that held the PS3 back (the PS3 would outsell the Xbox 360 for the first three quarters of the year most years, only to get soundly beaten by the Xbox 360 in the fourth quarter).

To suggest that free mass media news is unimportant to Sony is a mistake, IMO.  Sure that's true of the core gamers, but the most successful consoles reach well past the core gamers.

I think the world has changed a bit since the 1980s, even since the early 2000s. We have this all-pervasive, world-encompassing thing called the internet, and stuff like Facebook and Youtube and Twitter and all that. The home console business is more or less retreating to people who would call themselves gamers (even if only privately). While we might all be feeling happy about PS4's great sales, the fact of the matter is that this generation is going to see a major reduction in total console sales compared to the 7th gen, and probably will end up being lower than the 6th gen. Casual gamers have largely left the console market in favour of smartphone and Facebook gaming. All that add up to mass media attention being far less important for mid-gen gaming announcements than perhaps they once were.