I'd say both would be in a worse position? Shortages were not as bad when they launched in late 2020...potentially this had an impact on the price and maybe they have somewhat locked in their price with suppliers (just guessing here).

Luanching end of 2021 would definitely mean higher cost of hardware, and I doubt they would be able to produce anything significantly faster.

Games wise I think Sony are okay, im not a fan with their choice of games to produce (Demons Souls remake, Miles Morales, Sackboy) but the games were there. MS might have benefitted from a year delay with regards to games, but it seems like they still wont have anything meaningful in 2021...let alone 2020. So that would have been an even longer delay if the idea was to wait for big exclusives.

Gamepass and performance improvements (backward compat and system) seems to be the main selling point of Series X and its still sold relative well. Also releasing last year lines up perfectly with the Xbox strategy - get as many people on gamepass as possible.

So part of the OP's ideas was Sony/MS building up stock for longer before releasing it, which would somehow be more successful by avoiding situation of mismatch of supply/demand. I eyeballed the cost of doing that with Sony's sales to date and came up with about $3.5 billion. Which is insane to dedicate to building up stock for that long, and perhaps more importantly is money not being dedicated to developing more games. I just don't think those ideas were well thought out, but merely appealed to immediate perspective of reacting to perceived negativities. But if the solution isn't any better, it isn't really a solution. And most of the problem weren't really problems in the first place, they were just bottlenecks on how big of a success it could be, but it still was a success that was better than previous generations.

Just what I wanted to point out. But it could be even worse.

Since the fabs where the chips are produced are all running at full capacity, they deliver to their clients in a "first come, first served" manner. This is why cars have the shortages now, they dropped their microchip orders and found themselves now suddenly pushed to the back of the line. If the consoles would have released later, a similar scenario would have happened for them, too. After all, they couldn't just start production at the original date and continue producing at current speed until now - where would they put all those consoles? And any pause, any delay or any volume reduction would have stuck and be very hard to reverse again until the chip crunch is over.

Shortages will continue well into the next year, so launching this year in november would have changed exactly nothing.

Nope. I am pretty happy with mine. If you don't want to buy it now for some reason just wait and buy it later.

Demons Souls, Returnal and Ratchet and clank all have been excellent games, alongside with better versions of cross gen games.

I can’t complain.

Not really. The argument stems from a lack of innovation which could be rectified with a longer development time on the hardware.

An NVME drive shouldn't drive up cooling by that much, but Sony does have room to move on the firmware front, even a single db of fan noise would greatly improve thermals and no one would likely notice.

To understand shortages, we need to understand why they have happened.

Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo tend to forecast sales and then secure contracts based around those forecasts.
They then work with AMD and TSMC to fabricate the chips, then get them packaged by another supplier and then assembled by yet another supplier.

These tend to take many months of planning.

So it wouldn't actually make a difference if they released these consoles in 1998 or 2030, the contracts are based around sales forecasts (likely built from past sales trends).

The issue stems from Apple gobbling up a ton of 7nm supply, so whilst Sony and Microsoft could meet their original sales forecasts, they couldn't increase production because other companies like Apple, nVidia, AMD's other products, Qualcomm, HiSilicon, MediaTek and so forth... So when demand started to outstrip supply, they couldn't amend their contracts with more wafers... Not initially anyway.

With Apple moving production to 5nm, that gave AMD more wafers to secure in it's contracts, so that meant Sony and Microsoft could pump out more consoles... But due to COVID, people were more likely to stay home and thus the demand for home computer electronics increased substantially... So Supply/Demand was still not being met.

TSMC is increasing 7nm wafer supply which will become more evident in the latter half of 2021... However that still will not resolve all the issues until AMD moves Radeon and Ryzen to 5nm. (The largest consumer of 7nm)

But then we have the RAM and NAND crunch as well... Due to the demand for Notebooks, Netbooks, Tablets, Phones and other handhelds wanting more RAM and NAND... And those two chips being market driven commodities, it's shooting up price.

Sony and Microsoft can weather the pricing issue for the short term because it secured the prices earlier on in their contracts, but if they amend their contract, memory suppliers may argue for higher prices placing strain on the cost budgets of the 9th gen hardware.

There are more forces at play here, but Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo were -completely- caught off guard with their projections from the very start, the entire consumer electronics industry is scrambling to meet demand.

So... A delay wouldn't have changed much, if we start talking 2023 time frames then a delay may have been more beneficial as more companies would be on 3-5nm and there will be more capacity in general.

But a year? Won't do much.

At-least in Microsoft's case, this is one of the strengths of the Xbox Series S, it's chip is 190mm2 verses 360mm2, so they can get 117 dies (Chips) per wafer verses the Series S 214 dies per wafer... Plus the smaller RAM and NAND counts means the Series S can be built in much larger scales very easily, which is likely why we see it on shelves more often than the Playstation 5 or Series X.
The PS5 by comparison is around 137 dies per wafer.

At the moment doing Mass Effect Legendary on the Series X and Returnal on the Playstation 5. Enjoying both experiences at the moment.

In saying that, I wouldn't have missed out on anything substantial if I stuck with my Xbox One X and Playstation 4 Pro.

Crossgen games would have happened regardless of the release year tbh

I actually think they should have launched late 2019, and then they should have made every first party game released since then to be next gen exclusive. In most situations 6 years is the right amount of time between console iterations. Clearly there are a good amount of people ready for the next console iteration, since they are selling well in spite of a lack of Gen 9 exclusive titles. They waited too long to release Gen 9 systems.

You know you're in for an intellectual thunderdome when the OP starts with "I haven't actually played either of the consoles in question, but..."

As for the topic at hand, Yes to Xbox, no to Playstation. PS5 has had a phenomenal first year of exclusives and hype. Xbox has done well but we all know that it shoulda waited until Halo came out. Instead of fighting against PS5, it coulda waited until winter 2021 and had that season to itself instead of constantly being in Sony's shadow.