The PS5 makes for a shady Slim

As the genius prognosticators at Microsoft foretold, Sony is replacing the PS5 with the PS5 Slim in 2023. And it’ll be just in time for Black Friday, which I’m sure is not a coincidence.

Considering every single PlayStation ever received a slim model, this was inevitable as Thanos. Not to mention inevitable because how damn big the PS5’s original form factor is. It’s nearly the size of four PS4 Slims.

That being said, this generation’s shrink doesn’t really do much. The slim’s dimensions are listed as 358 × 96 × 216 mm, which is less than a centimeter thinner than the comically oversized OG PS5’s 390 × 104 x 260 mm. If you didn’t have space for a full-size PS5, you probably still don’t have room.

And that’s not the only reason to Slimmer down your excitement. As you may recall, previous Slim models not only got you a skinny console, but also a fat discount. For the PS3 and PS4, the Slim model also ushered in $200 price drops. The Slim PS5 drops the price from $500 to… $500. I’m sure nobody expected a PS5 Slim to go down to $300, but no price drop at all is, frankly, shocking. Somehow even worse is the PS5 Slim Digital Edition’s -$50 price drop, which takes it from $400 to $450. Because fuck us, that’s why.

Losing a few millimeters and a whole damn kilogram can do wonders for the console’s physique, but it did *furiously looks up the antonym of “wonders,” comes up empty* horrors for its stability. Even with the Blu-ray bump, a PS5 Slim can’t stand vertically by itself like the phatty could. It’ll cost you an extra $30 to get a vertical stand, as the included stand (again, unlike the phatty) is only capable of holding a PS5 Slim horizontally. Neverminding the deranged fact that the design of both PS5s is such that it requires a stand to lay “flat.”

While there are plenty of pictures featuring that vertical stand, there’s no direct photography of the horizontal one. The only hint we get of this stand is a tiny silver crutch in the only photo of the PS5 Slim in horizontal orientation… which was shot in a perspective that just so happens to hide as much of the stand as possible.

It’s not ALL bad news, but the real Slimness here is the silver lining.

New to this version of the PS5 hardware is a $80 disc drive that can be attached to the digital-only edition to upgrade it to the full show. It’s a solid idea, but I can’t help but think this would have been far more useful for the launch edition, given that supplies were so constrained during its first few years that customers looking for the disc-playing version often had to choose between going discless or going without any PS5. It could be this new design will make swapping out a dead drive on any Slim easy as pie; we don’t yet know if the disc drive for the regular PS5 Slim is integrated into the design or simply preinstalled.

The other genuine upside to these is that the slims’ built-in SSD starts at 1 TB instead of the bizarre amount of 825 GB. Given that the AAA games are all 100 GB or more these days, I would dare say that 1 TB is still inadequate (though 825 GB was min-maxing the cost to a ludicrous degree). Naturally, these additions aren’t at all worth the price hike over the original PS5 Digital Edition. So if you are very much a gamer of the future with no need for discs, I’d recommend grabbing the $400 OG Digital Edition before Sony’s warehouses run out.

Even more ambivalently, the front-facing USB-A port has changed over to USB-C. Depending on your situation with charging cables and other accessories, this news could be good or bad for any given person.

And finally, the last silver lining: If you managed to snag a PS5 already and felt bad about not holding out, rejoice! Those who did wait for slim were actually waiting for none.