If the Xbox Scorpio launches with a 3.0-3.5GHz Ryzen CPU and the 6TF Radeon GPU that has been rumored, the power gap between it and the PS4 Pro will be greater than the gap between the docked Nintendo Switch and PS4 Slim.

How does Sony respond?

PS5 announcement in 2018?

Another PS4 refresh with a more powerful CPU?

Will they be content having their 'Pro' console be half as powerful as their biggest competitor?

It will be very interesting to see what Sony does after touting the importance of power for the first 3 years of this generation! 

Gap wise? yes.
%-wise? no.  (scorpio vs ps4pro = ~42%? differnce, while PS4slim is like 400%+ of the Switch)
In terms of graphics? no. (4k checkerbording vs native 4k = not a huge differnce, smaller than Switch vs PS4)

How does Sony respond? They lower price 50$, and go "ours is 150$ cheaper"

349$ PS4pro vs 499$ Xbox Scorpio.... price wins.

They might try abit harder on 1st party games output, even if they are dominating in that reguard already.

Sony responds with lower price says how cute and has more games. I don't think they have anything to worry about for now. Switch is probably a bigger danger to PS4 than Scorpio.

I don't think Sony needs to respond. Games win you sales, Sony hasn't even released the big guns yet.

Obviously they have to react immediately, since everyone in the world owns the HDR-capable, 65-inch, $2000 4k tvs that are necessary to get the best out of these consoles. Also, didn't you just write about how the ps4 pro flopped? Would 2x power really make a huge difference if the market is so indifferent to power?

Sony don't need to worry one bit. With 360, Xbox's glory days ended. Don't think MS will be at the forefront of console gaming ever again. Think Sony is more concerned about that switch.

Game lineup alone is enough response.

The question you need to ask is how does Microsoft respond to that? Will Scorpio be a huge cannon but without any cannon balls?

It doesn't matter nearly as much.

That's because the baseline for third party games is still the vanilla PS4/XO. New releases still have to run on those boxes. Both manufacturers have made that clear. This isn't a situation where developers have to go backwards or spend time porting to a different architecture.

They don't have to, I don't see the Scorpio tilting sales in MS's favor at all, in fact this could very well end up being a huge mistake! E3 2019 is when I think we will here some info on it (or around that time) maybe even see a 2019 release, that will roughly give it 6 years and that's about how long the difference between the PS3 and PS4 launch (well I think that was 7 years).

I think 6 years is fine to be honest, but this gen is different. Last gen saw some pretty solid hardware and that's why we were able to get the life span out of those consoles like we saw. This time around we had a pretty big tech shift in TV's and I think both MS and Sony released consoles that probably were a little under powered. What will coax a few more years are these refreshes. Saying that the PS4 Pro did not exactly break the bank and the Scorpio looks to be pretty expensive.

Lets say Sony releases a new console in 2019 or 2020, MS will have to answer so lets say they also release in 2019 or 2020 that's 3 years between a major refresh and a new console. Not many are going to like the sounds of that one. Either that or they sit for a year or two on old hardware and lets Sony take the lead again. The timing of this is just not right. If it was a nice refresh like the PS4 Pro then I think it would be alright but it's basically a new console.