cloudguy

Sony notoriously does not play well with others. The company's consoles have been resistant to outside influence or interaction, the Playstation Network has several lock-in effects, and even Playstation exclusive titles cannot be played anywhere else.

So ... then Sony has the Apple business model then. Oh ... I get it. You guys want to keep nearly all Apple products and services locked into Apple's ecosystem while expecting other companies to open their ecosystems up to Apple! That's rich especially considering that even when Sony does relent to market forces and make an xCloud/GeForce Now/Stadia competitor Apple will block it from iOS and iPadOS too and force Sony to make a PWA (not exactly an area of expertise for them). 

Here's a thought: maybe the walled garden approach works as well for XBox as it does for Apple? As Sony has:
1. the #1, #2, #3 and #5 selling consoles (PS2, PS4, PS and PS3)
2. the only console to exceed 105 million in sales (155, 112 ... with the Wii the only non-PS console to reach 85 million by barely cracking 100 million)
3. the only current generation console to reach 70 million (and before the Switch the only one to reach 50 million)

then just maybe the walled garden strategy is working as well for Sony as it is for Apple?

Please remember: Nintendo didn't open things up by choice. They did so only because the combination of the Wii U tanking and competition with iOS (in the U.S.) and Android (globally) for casual gaming meant that they needed to do something to keep from going bankrupt. So - among other things - Nintendo was forced to break with decades of tradition allow mature titles on the Switch to compete (and they did so very quietly).

Meanwhile Microsoft can no longer milk Halo, Asian markets continue to ignore the XBox and Intel's new i5 and higher Tiger Lake chips are capable of 1080p gaming without discrete GPUs meaning that the starting price for gaming PCs and desktops will drop to under $500. This makes xCloud their only play for relevance.

So, as PlayStation still rules the roost in console gaming with its competitors not really being close, there is really no need for them to change their approach. If they do, it would be to take yet another shot at a Switch-type handheld. (Would likely need to run Android, however, to succeed where the PlayStation Vita failed ... which ironically mean that it would run PlayStation games AND xCloud!!!)

foregoneconclusion said:

Strange design decisions by both companies in this generation. They seem to be able to understand what works best for controllers but not for the console box. 

Hilarious. When companies emulate the design language of the Mac Pro, Mac Mini, Apple TV, MacBook (and of course iPhone and iPad) Apple folks bash them. When companies come up with their own unique design language ... Apple folks bash them. How about just root for Apple to make their own console then?

Good grief. Look at the INTERNALS of the PS5 and XBX. After you do that, please provide a different design that wouldn't result in a 3 alarm fire from the octacore Zen 2 CPU and RDNA2 GPU from overheating. There is no design in the current acceptable Apple design language - whether the rounded box like the Apple TV and Mac Mini or the trashcan like the Mac Pro - that would have gotten either anywhere near 8K and 120Hz. 

OctoMonkey said:

When Microsoft bought Bungie, killed the (working) Macintosh Halo game in order to create an Xbox version for use as their premiere launch title, I decided to never own an Xbox...  and I never have.  Looking forward to purchasing the PS5 (especially with the updated VR system).

For all their aesthetically pleasing designs, Sony really didn't do a good job with the asymmetric look of the optical drive PS5.  Ah well, still not an Xbox.  :-)

So ... Microsoft did what Apple does all the time - buy a company whose products were multiplatform and made it a company exclusive - and you complain about it? Talk about entitled. 

Take a step back a bit. Qualcomm's best laptop chip (used in Windows Surface type devices and soon in Chromebooks) is the 8cx and it has benchmarks comparable to the Intel i5.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-s-Snapdragon-8cx-amasses-respectable-score-on-Geekbench-and-closes-in-on-Intel-s-Core-i5-8250U.434104.0.html

And the 8cx came out in early-mid 2019 on the 7nm process, making it equivalent to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 that is in the Microsoft Surface Duo phone/tablet and last year's flagship Android phones like the Pixel 4 and OnePlus 7. Meaning that the next Qualcomm Snapdragon laptop chip - which will come out this year on a 5nm process and contain the new Cortex X1 super core jointly designed by ARM Holdings and Samsung - will match the Intel Core i7. Early benchmarks from Qualcomm and Samsung chips are in that use the new Cortex X1 design and 5nm process which state that the increase in performance over the 865 - the same basic architecture as the 8cx - is significant. 

So the ability of smartphone SOCs to surpass AMD and Intel CPUs in clock frequencies and benchmark tests has been no big deal for quite some time. For example, Snapdragon CPUs in Android phones surpassed the 1.1 GHz dual core Intel Core i3 that is in the MacBook Air some time ago. The question is whether these ARM CPUs can have similar or better performance when running a laptop operating system - macOS as opposed to iOS - with equivalent workloads - i.e. true multitasking/multithreading and heavy I/O that Apple doesn't allow on iOS or even an iPad Pro running iPadOS. For example, running a demo full stack application that has the client app, server app and middleware in separate containers ... the sort of thing that college students in web development classes run all the time. 

THAT is what everyone is waiting to see. The Windows on ARM devices don't give us any indication because the app support is terrible, and the first ChromeOS device on Snapdragon 8cx won't hit until 2021. So next week is when everyone is going to find out how much better Apple Silicon is going to be than i5, i7 and possibly i9 chips on professional workloads.

commentzilla said:

I suspect no 3rd party GPUs

Nothing to "suspect." Apple has come right out and said it.