That's why you need to balance out your anecdotal perspective with the larger market one. Your hang-ups are from a personal POV which certainly has value, but at least from what I've seen, some of it is based on misintepretation. You mention the 18% flops thing for starters; well at least now people seem to finally be over the TF hump, but instead of balancing that out, there's a lot of certain people trying to make TF completely irrelevant now. That's just them going from one extreme to the other extreme, dumb decision in both cases. TFs alone don't make a system better or worst than the other, but thinking it's only going to be used for prettier graphics is a pretty bad misinterpetation IMHO. We've already seen this gen that isn't strictly the case and current-gen was hamstrung by shitty CPUs. That increases the scope of GPGPU for next gen by magnitudes.
The Mac Pro thing, again that's a personal POV but you have to understand that isn't the case for a lot of people and some just don't WANT to play games on their laptop or PC. Even if I had a PC rig that could run circles around next-gen, I'd still be interested in picking both systems up because if I'm using my PC for productivity work the majority of the day, I don't want to ALSO unwind and try chilling on that same PC to play games after spending hours working on it. Taking my play to the living room, lounging on a couch, kicking my feet up there and having a big screen to game on (or watch movies on) is a much better gaming experience to me versus doing everything on PC. Your perspective in that regard is probably not aligned with the majority; again it doesn't mean it's invalid. But the proportion is what it is and it's always worth considering.
My point about MS and Sony competing in PC space isn't ludicrous; you missed my entire point. I was implying that Sony's reason for shifting towards that space as another market segment (that doesn't have to come at the expense of the console market, btw) has more to do with them future-proofing their market possibilities. Look, home consoles as we know them now won't be around forever, except perhaps with Nintendo, and even they're more interested in the hybrid stuff now. Entertainment markets are converging into more and more shared ecosystems, and with entertainment options ballooning, companies have to compete against more options than they did in the past.
Sony has a history as a strong consumer electronics company but the markets for dedicated electronics they built their reputation on are shrinking, some have for a long time now. Those markets, like CD players (Walkman), televisions (Trinitron) etc. are still important markets but the gulf in the amount of quality and features you'd get from low-end brands back in the day compared to the upper-tier brands has basically reached the point of diminished returns for the majority of mainstream consumers. There used to be a time the average person wouldn't dare want to pick up a cheapo 3rd-rate television from the '90s over a Sony, JVC, Hitachi etc. TV. Nowadays you've got no-name 4K brands who can offer the same tech and features (for the most part) as the similarly-priced premier-brand sets, and the level of quality, features etc. to the average mainstream consumer means they're almost just as likely to pick that no-name brand over an established one. It doesn't even matter to a lot of them if the no-name brand is less reliable, because with how commonplace budget-shopping trends have become most people buy new TVs out of habit on Black Friday or Christmas holiday even if they don't NEED a new TV!
That's something Sony or MS don't want to get stuck with when it comes to console gaming; a future where the abilities of a relatively top-end gaming system can be had in commodity systems, phones etc. by less-established brands but wherein the performance delta between their offerings and Sony's or MS's is so small to the average consumer that they just go with which one can offer it cheaper. We already know the smartphone gaming market trumps the console gaming one by a considerable amount; if and when smartphone makers like Apple can manage to squeeze power into their devices that can match a home console, and standardize console-style controls, that's when shit get real for guys like Microsoft and Sony. Why do you think MS mentioned Google and Amazon as potential competitors? Why do you think Apple has Apple Arcade? Do you not think these smartphone companies are looking at stuff like the Switch and seeing how they can emulate that in their own space to offer competitor products?
Point is, Sony, MS and even Nintendo have to compete with more than just themselves these days. Back in the '90s and '00s entertainment markets as a whole were more divergent or "stayed in their own lane", so to speak. They still competed with each other against consumers for their entertainment dollars but nowhere near the level it is today, because the lack of mainstream internet or having TONS of entertainment options both available to them (or produced; costs of production and free/middleware solutions have made production of entertainment cheaper and easier than ever) acted as safeguards. Those are mostly gone now, and that's even before I get into the crossover effect (i.e there was less general crossover of industries as a whole back then, say gaming and film for example. You had your usual licensed games (most of them sucked) and a few actors (B/C/D-tier ones) in games but that was about it).
Microsoft doesn't want to find themselves in that kind of position, no company does. So it makes sense to build towards a future where if market conditions drastically change (and trends indicate such coming along the way), they are ready to quickly respond and adjust. Sony is just as interested in securing their long-term future as well, THAT's why I'm saying they are doing a lot of the same things as MS, just less so due to being a bit further behind the 8-ball and other factors. It wasn't me trying to paint them with a broad brush as if to besmirch them. I'm just talking wider, long-term market possibilities and realities.
This upcoming gen might be the last one we get before the rate of technological development and costs for R&D, production, marketing etc. of a console (plus the standardization of architectural specifications across sectors of consumer tech industries) reach a convergence point where the barrier to entry opens things up for a lot of other players, including big players like Apple or Google. We can laugh at Stadia right now; it's garbage in its current form. But we know where it can lead to and that's the part companies like MS (and yes, Sony) are being mindful of.
I think you're being a bit naive to take everything someone like Herman Hurst says upfront; look at the actions and not the words. I mentioned God of War 4 for a reason; it's had info altered on its site the same way Horizon did before that got confirmed for PC. Death Stranding (strongly associated with Sony and PS as pretty much a 1st-party title) got a PC release confirmed before the PS4 version even came out. Games like Dreams might be making their way to PC, and we already know Sony will probably be using Azure servers in some capacity the next few years. You can call that "hedging their bets" and that's well and good, because they are. But whatever distinction you think there is between them "hedging bets" and MS trying to "save face" or go all in while treating consoles as an afterthought, well you've already mentioned yourself you have a bias, and you've probably mixed that up with misinterpetation of some things that have been said by both companies.
And I hope everything I'm saying isn't taken the wrong way. Some people'll probably see everything I've written here and think I'm trying to push support for one brand over another or whatever. Neither MS or Sony are lining my pockets so I could care less if whatever I say is for or against certain ideas or actions around them. But I like this kind of speculation a lot, same with console specs as a whole, and I just have a habit of writing a lot. But while you might have your bias for Sony this gen and my preference (in terms of which one I'm getting out of the gate) is mostly neutral but leaning towards XSX, I just have to scratch my head when people keep trying to tell themselves these two companies are wildly different from each other in terms of their end-goal in pursuing GaaS and cloud initiatives, and a more platform-agnostic model. They're more alike in those goals for their gaming efforts than some would like to admit; the difference is with MS being mostly driven by productivity and services software, the gaming stuff happens to be more obviously tied into it. Outside of gaming software and some PC productivity stuff (music creator stuff, etc.), Sony isn't really "driven" by software, so they have more leeway in how that type of stuff can be messaged alongside general PS developments.
It's down mostly to image of perception where people think the end-goals in each one's gaming divisions differ, but that perception isn't as true as some would like to think. And for those who don't want to acknowledge such, they are basically (usually) paranoid about the end-goal down to misunderstanding and fear of the shift, because they think it will automatically entail a replacement, rather than an additive to what we are already used to. It CAN be additive and whichever company does that will be better positioned going forward. Right now, MS seems like that company out of the two, but we'll see where Sony is in that regard in a couple more years.
PS5 is only getting haptic feedback now; MS had haptic feedback in XBO controller in 2013. It was simply under-utilized.
Cell was a technological dead-end that costed Sony all PS1 and PS2 profits; it's work with SPEs was helpful with multi-core processor development but Cell as its whole technological self never materialized to the level its investors wanted. It also wasn't JUST a Sony thing: IBM and Toshiba were just as involved and IBM honestly pushed development further than Sony did (they supported iterative development on Cell longer than Sony, up to even early years of PS4).
Blu-Ray was similarly a mutli-company effort. Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic etc. were ALL involved in its development, that's why the Blu Ray Disc Association exists. Sony helped it proliferate with PS3, but they were hardly the only ones who developed the tech.
The Ace engines were not actually exclusive to PS4; at pretty much the same time it was released, the RX 290X, which also featured Ace engines, launched. So it's debatable how much of that was due to Sony designing them themselves and working with AMD to put in, or if the Ace engines were already a part of AMD's roadmap at the time Sony leveraged them for inclusion in PS4. Going by what we're seeing from them and MS this gen regarding RDNA2, the latter was the more probable scenario.
Now I'm not taking anything away from what Sony did with PS3 and PS4, and they have done a lot of neat things with PS5's SSD and audio. But we also don't know all of the details on both systems in terms of how this stuff really works, and what potential specific benefits and disadvantages they could bring. And at least from what we've seen so far it's not like MS's audio is any slouch, either; the two seem at least even on that note, and their SSD seems to have a lot of the same features as Sony's though it's over 2x slower in actual hardware terms (and probably has less flash channels as well for number of chips).
I could go on to clarify your other point, but I'm running out of time to post for now. Maybe might edit later.
I agree, they maximized the shit out of that GPU chip by pushing the clocks as high they have, that's impressive. But I think people need to be more realistic about performance metrics between the two. Overall they should perform mostly on par, but we also know typical 3rd-party titles usually don't utilize very specific advantages of hardware unless they have a true need to (either it's a 3rd-party exclusive, timed-exclusive, etc.).
There will be, even in third-party titles (some at least) areas where PS5's advantages give it an edge here or there, and other areas where XXS's advantage will give it the edge. I've been calculating a lot of numbers on known info for both systems so far and have come to some interesting conclusions for the both of them, but I'm not finished with that yet. Anyway, yes we also know that it has the very good SSD that will be uitlized by 1st-party devs in particular, but XSX has a raw GPU advantage where it will have a big lead in GPGPU compute tasks for non-graphics code, that IMHO will bring bigger game design shifts than simply the SSDs.
It's a case though where both systems can essentially leverage advantages that the other has the strength in (PS5 - SSD, XSX - GPGPU compute), they just have to sacrifice in a few other things to do so (PS5 - graphics fidelity, XSX - GPGPU compute (might have to use parts of that to make up for slower SSD). Just very vague and general situations on my end, but something I've been thinking will be defining cases from the 1st-party between the two.
Anyway that's all I can post for now, I typed WAY more than anticipated xD.
