700 dollars and they expect you to pay more for a stand is actually hilarious.

DoA. Another L to add to Sony's collection. Facts.

Insane price. Even moreso when considering it’s incomplete. Hoping this bombs to be honest, can’t have these kinds of precedents.

No, this is what happens taking the increased manufacturing costs into account. Sony doesn't want to lose money on hardware, hence this $700 price tag is not really unexpected.

We will see how (un?-)well this thing sells, though. Too many people still think they can get higher end PC performance in a cheap console form. That is not going to happen anymore. Of course that begs the question of what MS/Sony will do with their next console generation. You want RT4090 performance, you pay RT4090 prices..

I am guessing you have never been a PC gamer? I and many others here have been building rigs for more than two decades. I find it funny how you believe people are expecting RTX 4090 performance, I know many US buyers can build a nice enough rig for a $1000 and absolutely destroy this overpriced piece of plastic. Sony have forgotten this is a console, and console prices such as this will obviously push some (although still a minority probably) to just spend a little extra. Or some will obviously just buy a slim and let this nose dive sales wise and rot on retail shelves.

That's the thing though. The entire console has been built around selling your console hardware at a loss, and then making money on software and accessories. We've seen Sony get arrogant before when it came to the PS3. They had so much runaway success with no competition for 2 consecutive generations that they literally said that people would be willing to work a second job to get a PS3. 

Now with again the runaway success of the PS4 and PS5, Sony is back to that level of arrogance. Competition brings prices down. That's always been the rule and it always will be. 

I mean not really. They've been charging monopoly prices for years because most people used to their OS/ecosystem is too committed to it to consider an alternative while PC and Android manufactorers still have each other to compete with.

As for PS there are still other gaming alternatives and I'm 99 % sure MS will go over to PC-based consoles at some point rather than dropping it entirely, but yeah they don't have much 1 to 1 competition.

Sony would be stupid to take hardware losses any longer. Why should they? Because of XBox? Haha.

That stuff is in the past, business wise they'd be idiots to continue eating hardware losses for no reason. 

People are just going to have to get used to this range of pricing as the new normal as I doubt it will be any less for a PS6 and maybe even more. 

The next generation will be the frame gen + upscaling generation. Probably not a lot faster than the PS5 Pro in raw specs except for CPU and RT.

Sony has always been the Apple of Japan.

Sony Computer Entertainment was actually the exception... most generations, that is.

The price gap between PC and console is getting smaller. AMD focusing on price point, and not high end, will only tighten the gap. Add in cheaper games and free online... PC is going to grow. Perhaps that is why Sony and MS are both full PC now.

PC gaming isn't as expensive as people think it is.  It can be super expensive, but it doesn't have to be.  A 7800xt is a heck of a gpu for $450.