In this issue of The Raven Express, I have thoughts about the iPhone 16 and PlayStation 5 Pro hardware reveals and why you don’t need to rush out to upgrade what you already have.
Passing on the new, shiny thing
It’s late summer. The sun is shining bright and hot still, but the shadows are getting just a little chillier as the breeze begins to get sharper. It’s the hint of fall around the corner with yet another massive retail holiday to come. That makes now the perfect time for the Big Tech Companies to reveal their new expensive toys that millions will be mining their couch cushions and credit card balances for swiftly.
Like a modern religion, Apple adherents turn their gaze upon Cupertino each September to receive the new testament of the iPhone, the company’s most important product. Seriously, it accounts for half the company’s revenue, a number that exceeded $200 billion last year. Billion. This ritual is so precise and regular that those picking up new iPhones in August are heckled online.
But the annual problem is, as it has been forever at this point, that new models are minor, iterative improvements over the previous year’s. For some Apple fans, the increasing smallness of these iterations may seem underwhelming, but this is especially true if you tote an Android phone because iPhones are “yucky icky gross” in the best case scenario.
The smartphone is a mature product category. The iPhone’s reshaping of the whole business kicked off nearly two decades ago and even if there is metrically just as much research and development being implemented each year, it becomes less apparent as core features have been firmly established and then polished to a fine sheen long ago.
What’s really left to innovate on in the phone space? Even Android phone makers are getting bored, so they’re experimenting with weird shit like folding phones, an expensive solution to a problem that few people seem to have. Look at an even more mature industry: cars, for example, are not adding fifth wheels or second steering columns or fourth row seating. They’re going electric, yes, but really they’re getting larger, heavier and increasingly deadly to pedestrians. They all kinda look like Hyundais now.
For the 2024 model iPhone 16s, the biggest changes come with the out-of-the-box ability to do their new “Apple Intelligence” thing that implements artificial intelligence text summaries and generative AI nonsense, something that last year’s Pro models can handle and consumers are increasingly becoming critical of. Their AI also powers an improved Siri assistant, which has been fundamentally useless for as long as it’s existed. (Moving from Android to iPhone and losing the immediate Google Assistant was the biggest blow.)
iPhone 16s are getting 48-megapixel ultrawide cameras, up from 12 but the most enticing feature that Apple added this year is “Camera Control”, which is a sophisticated shutter button on the right side of the device. From my first Android phone, the Samsung Epic 4G on Sprint, I have always loved a dedicated two-stage shutter button for my cellular photography.
Then again, Windows Phone mandated the two-stage shutter button on all of their phones and look where they are today. (And yes, I know you can flip the phone the other way and use the volume rocker as a shutter button, but it’s not the same.)
But these are minor things, really. Apple sells tons of phones every year not because people are tossing last year’s models in the trash, but because users like me have had theirs for 2-4 years and are wanting to upgrade. I daily an iPhone 13 Pro Max, which I picked up in 2022, and while I’m super excited about Camera Control and the sensor size increases, I’m not planning to upgrade until the 17 or 18 at the earliest. My phone just works.
Frankly, people who upgrade their phones every year are really silly geese with money burning holes in their pockets.
While Apple’s September ceremony is something expected and normal, Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro console reveal was a little different. Video game console hardware updates typically get twice-a-decade improvements so they’re a bit rarer. The PS5 Pro had been leaked for months, but its shape and function finally took form this past week with the debut of a broadly panned piece of new, unnecessary hardware that adds features people aren’t terribly noticeable while removing features people actually want and charging a whopping $699.99 for it.
The questionable necessity of the PS5 Pro is born of 2016’s PS4 Pro. Game consoles, very broadly speaking, used to come out in five-year update cycles. Because technology was advancing so quickly in the 80s and 90s, each new console — and definitely each new generation — felt like it unlocked a huge raft of new graphical, gameplay and online-connected potential, like high definition graphics and downloadable games.
By the 00s, in an arc that predates the smartphone, video game hardware matured. 100,000 polygons looked a bit too similar to the normal mapped 10,000 polygons of the previous generation and people stopped caring as much. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 both made storage and online connectivity a priority, so Microsoft and Sony could press pause on the vast expanse of developing, promoting and shipping new hardware, opting to extend its life with software and online experiences. The game makers still updated their hardware, but with an eye toward reducing costs (and features).
But gamers started feeling the burn of old hardware as 2010 and 2011 passed by and Microsoft and Sony brought the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 to market at the end of 2013.
So now what do they do? What’s the best compromise between letting a console generation run long and still offering beefed up new hardware so that gamers can still expect new visual tricks? Enter: the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X, which released mid-cycle at new, higher price points with slightly refreshed hardware that played all your existing games from that generation.
It wasn’t a “slam it out of the park” shift in technology, nor did these half-step consoles dominate the user base, but it was an option that appeased the pixel-thirsty hardcore gamers who brag about spending money to validate their hobby.
Now that it’s 2024, it is now time for the PlayStation 5 Pro.
In the wake of COVID, there’s a general dreariness that this newest console generation, which kicked off in 2020, hasn’t really begun yet. First-party exclusives haven’t really highlighted the need for people to upgrade, old hardware still works just fine and those games will play on newer consoles, plus graphics technology hasn’t advanced much in the past 20 years, anyway.
Again, video gaming is a mature category.
Hand-in-hand with the rumors about the PS5 Pro were complaints that the hardware was unnecessary. Microsoft is deciding to skip their half-step console by increasing internal games and media storage while maintaining similar prices with a small refresh this holiday. Now that the PS5 Pro is unveiled and set to deliver this holiday, the backlash is real, loud and out in the open.
So here are the concerns, really:
1. ) The hardware spec bump isn’t going to improve graphics much, which I’ve just rambled about. Some have expressed interest that this may increase the fidelity of their virtual reality product, the PSVR2, but that thing is all but dead at this point.
2.) At $699.99, it’s expensive. Look, I’ve got the same access to inflation calculators as you do. The $299 PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2001 are $533 today, which isn’t some big leap. The more expensive Xbox 360 launch SKU with a 20GB hard drive and a headset was $399.99 in 2005, which is $644 today: striking distance of Sony’s new product.
The problem is that allowing gamers to not need to pick between the “faster” looking Performance mode and the “better” looking Fidelity mode that have become common to modern console games is a niche solution to a niche problem. These are largely Fortnite-playing machines. Few games push the high end of video game hardware in the first place because it’s expensive to do so these days.
Unlike the PS2 or the Xbox 360 as their premium debuts, the PS5 Pro is not a valuable option, it’s an expensive option. It does not intrigue, solve vast problems or create interesting new opportunities. You can say all day that this was never intended to replace the base PS5, which is true but sorta missing the point: why offer it at all and confuse customers? (Also, if these half-step consoles sold like gangbusters, you bet your ass that Microsoft and Sony would discontinue their older hardware ASAP.)
Of course, this leads us to the final issue people have:
3.) It doesn’t come with a disc drive. Out of the box, it doesn’t play discs. You can get that functionality, but it’s an optional $80 peripheral on top of the asking price.
Sony and Microsoft can make dumb decisions but they’re not stupid. The PlayStation maker has said that 80% of their gaming revenue these days is purely digital, downloaded from the internet, not on shiny Blu-rays that spin in optical drives. Retailers have been removing physical media from their stores for years because people have stopped buying it.
There are those who believe in physical ownership of games and that’s fine, but even those physical games can become useless these days as publishers switch off the serves that allow those games to function. As video game journalist and pundit Jeff Gerstmann has said, “that ship has sailed.”
I can only speak for myself, but I have not bought a physical game for a console or otherwise in over 11 years. I say this as someone who runs a YouTube channel with 20,000 subscribers that has largely grown on the back of retrospectives on older games. I don’t do discs anymore. I built the computer I’m typing this on right now without ever planning to install an optical drive. I have been just fine.
I get people have collections of games that they want to continue to play into the future, but the disc is going the way of the dodo. That is the reality of it all. This hardware was absurd before we even talked about the lack of an optical drive, so its omission seems like small potatoes.
And for those who are going “oh, for $700, you’re getting into the range of just buying a PC”, I tell you this: No. As someone who has been gaming on the PC for nearly 30 years: No. People won’t be picking between a PS5 Pro and an RTX 4090 video card.
This is all to say: just enjoy what you have, it’s more than good enough. Go buy an iPhone 14 or 15 or a PlayStation 5 base model. You’ll be good.
DON’T EAT ME OKAY I’M SUPER CUTE
- Captain Kirby Jack Raven, a.k.a. Yes, you should still subscribe to the newsletter.
The Raven’s Recommendation
This is something I’ve munched on since the last time we’ve chatted that I want to share with you.
Before computer-generated imagery was in everything, it was the huge selling point of Canadian kids TV show Reboot, which debuted in 1994. The story of Bob, Dot and Enzo, digital beings of a virtual computer who must play “games” to maintain the integrity of their system (or something like that, it’s been a few decades), the show has been a cult classic for us elder millennials. During the production of a documentary about the show, D1 master tapes of the original episodes were found in a much higher quality than what reached broadcast and even the original DVDs.
Hey, look, it’s a hard sell in 2024, with its visually crude graphics, even with the crisper, higher resolution details (the lack of motion blur makes it kind of irritating to look at, frankly) but it’s a unique window into what popular CGI was capable of three decades ago.