The tech heads at Digital Foundry have gathered to discuss Sony's PS5 Pro reveal, and the conversation is a level-headed one considering various facets of the upcoming console. It's well worth a watch, and we've embedded it above. Perhaps most interesting is their view on the PS5 Pro's premium cost; while many (including us) have been shocked by the $700 MSRP, Digital Foundry reasons that, like it or not, the price tag is about in step with where consumer electronics are heading.
Though the price has gone down "like a cup of cold sick", as Richard Leadbetter so eloquently puts it, he and John Linneman say it's the ever-increasing costs of making high-end devices pushing the console's price up. "Consumer electronics are going up in price generally," Leadbetter says, adding that "flagship [smartphones] are $1,000 upwards typically" and so Sony "probably will find an audience for this".
Building on this point, Linneman says that the relatively flat sticker price of consoles over the years, despite steadily increasing production costs, is partly to blame for the widespread shock around PS5 Pro. "People generally expect [consoles] to sit within a fairly narrow price window," he says, adding that this crept up as HD consoles came in, but that expectation is clashing with the rising manufacturing costs in the electronics space. "Electronics in general are becoming extremely expensive," he says, using phones and graphics cards as examples, and alluding to comments from Microsoft about how costly making consoles is getting. "It all makes sense why the [PS5 Pro] price is so high, it's just that, in this space, it's sort of stayed within a certain price ceiling," Linneman says.
While that's all very reasonable, the group still feels the price is coming in too high. Leadbetter says it's "pushing the limits for sure", and reasons that, if PS5 is "breaking even at $500", he doesn't see "$200 of additional [production] costs [for PS5 Pro]" based on what we've been shown so far.
Again, it's worth watching the whole breakdown video, in which they discuss the presentation itself, PS5 Pro's "big three" features, the disc drive being sold separately, and plenty more.