If "oh I'm a pc gamer"  is a retort for every argument, then you need to stop trolling console gamers in this thread. 

"yooooooo shaaaaall noot paaaaaaassss!"

Well I can buy a bluray drive for PC that is capable of reading UHD blurays (BDXL) for $60 usd from amazon. All I will need in order to play it after is software so I highly doubt it is costing MS anywhere close to $40 since they most likely get them dirt cheap and consumers have to pay the consumer tax. 

https://www.amazon.com/LG-WH16NS40-Internal-Blu-ray-Rewriter/dp/B00E7B08MS?ie=UTF8&qid=1456077855&sr=8-3&keywords=lg+burner&tag=blurayforum-20

Now Bluray is mostly dead on PC but majority of the sources that I have come accross say that is one of the few Bluray drives that is capable of reading UHD bluray on PC. And of course that is a Bluray writer as well so it costs a lot more than a reader which the x1/ps4 have.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I still think Sony should have included it cause they are essentially throwing MS a bone by not including it. Will it change things? Most likely not but its better to be safe than sorry. We shall see how everything plays out soon enough tho.

Why including 4k support in a ps4 slim? its rather obsolete considering its a shortlived ntermediate piece of hardware and the next iteration is just around the corner, most propably releasing earlier than the scorpio. And... who the hell needs 4k now? Yes, UHD TVs become more and more affordable but its still far away from being a standard.

Nah, just stating the most likely outcome. Though, I do have to say it is quite hilarious how PC gamers always feel it necessary to let you know they game on PC. Did anyone ask or say they cared? You were commenting on a console, right?

To me, it either screams insecurity or someone saying "Yea, I'm here discussing consoles, and I may have just bashed yours (not saying you were bashing any of them), but I game on PC so I don't really care and it's beneath me, which means I should get away with what I just said. Cause like I said I game on PC, its really all I care about, which is why I'm on a console sales site."

If this is 200 or 250 bucks, they will probably slaught MS. TBH, I don't see many people interested in Blu-Rays, it's really just a niche that still gets films on discs. The 4K BR drive is pretty expensive, so cutting it on the low-end model seems reasonable. Do you really think that a 300 dollar PS4 Slim with 4K BR and HDR support would have more impact than a stripped down model that's 50-100 bucks cheaper?

A 4K HDR TV isn't something mainstream yet. It's more of a high-end device. The cheapest ones are around 1000 dollars. I don't see someone who pays this much on a TV getting a PS4 slim instead of the higher-end PS4K model, specially if the rumours about a 400 dollar price point are true. Even if it's 500 bucks, it's not that expensive for people buying 65' high-end televisions.

Sony probably learnt from the launch PS3 experience. That console was overloaded with premium features. Blu Ray support in its infancy and when it wasn't even certain to become the leading technology against HD-DVD. 4 USB ports. Native PS2 hardware components inside the console allowing for almost perfect backwards compatibility that was enhanced via HDMI output. Various card inputs that only a photographer would really use etc. In the end, these features did not matter to the masses and only served to inflate the cost of the console severely.

I think dropping the optical port was silly in that is would have added all but $1.50 per console but by not including a 4K blu ray drive, it allows Sony to under-cut the Xbox One Slim quite significantly. Microsoft is now in the same position there were when they launched with mandatory Kinect bundles only. In fact, they are worse off because they cannot un-bundle a 4K blu ray drive outside of a hardware revision.

I for one would have loved the PS4 Slim to be able to play 4K blu rays, but then again I went out of my way to purchase a launch PS3 just to play PS2 games via HDMI and I happen to collect blu rays. I'm not even sure we will see 4K blu rays take off considering only very recent movies take full advantage of the format, as most movies in the last decade were at best filmed and finished in 1080P, rather than 2160P(4K). We did see 'mastered in 4k' blu rays but they were essentially 4K scans of the original prints downscaled to 1080P. Even The Martian was finished on a 1080P digital intermediate, although shot at 5K resolution... The 4k blu ray is upscaled from its 1080P master. Although now we are seeing more new films actually finished in 2160P.

I imagine that it was simply a case of very few people using the optical port. Think of it this way.

Say Sony sold 40 million PS4s with optical ports but only 2 million people ever used it. That means Sony spent $60 million on 2 million users.

So with the Slim they decided that it wasn't worth the cost or board space to include it.

I believe that's important to remember that we will have a high-end model soon, for 400 or 500 bucks. The kind of people that have 4K sets, use optical ports and really expends a bit of cash on home theaters and such, will probably want the best model, specially because it will run games in higher resolutions to really make their expensive TV sets shine.

I really can't see someone expend 2K on a TV and go "oh, no, 500? That's expensive. I'm saving 200 bucks with the low-end model!".

What's the point of optical ports ?

I have a home theater, ditched optical s/pdif a long time ago. It doesn't support lossless audio for over 2 channels. It was useful when I still used my old amp without hdmi in the living room.

I do hope (but won't hold my breath) is that Neo has dual hdmi out ports, one for audio, as I don't want to upgrade my amp yet (no hdmi 2.0 pass through). Going back to lossy audio over optical s/pdif for upscaled 4K visuals is half a step forward, big step back :/