There are some nuggets of news you just hope aren’t true, you know? Sure, in a year plagued by nearly every conceivable negative headline possible, the news that Sony might be reducing the number of PlayStation 5 units doesn’t really feel all that significant yet we have to hold on to whatever hope we can, right? With the race into the next generation nearing its end, Sony’s still got a fair amount it needs to share with potential users, a problem it’s seemingly going to rectify this Wednesday with a new digital showcase. Yet while pricing might only be announced then, it seems there could be another problem waiting in the wings for the PlayStation 5: Manufacturing.
According to a report published by Bloomberg, Sony has cut expectations for the PS5 by around four million units. This follows a report a few months back that Sony was actually boosting production on their next-gen console to around 10 million in December of this year but now it’s looking like the company is only aiming to hit 11 million by March of 2021. The reason for the cutbacks is down to the internals of the machines becoming harder and harder to produce, slowing the process down dramatically.
That same Bloomberg report mentions that the core-processing unit of the PlayStation 5, designed by AMD, has been the real culprit with “production yields as low as 50%”, meaning at least half the parts needed for the PlayStation 5 aren’t of a quality that allows them to be shipped. The yield numbers have been improving but they have “yet to reach a stable level.”
All of this is to say that buying a PlayStation 5 at launch, even if you do have all that cash lying around, might be a little harder than initially expected. It could be the case that Sony and AMD manage to pull a CPU out of a hat and make everything work but until then, it might be a decent idea to wait a few months before leaping into next-gen, which would be decent advise for anyone at this point anyway.
(Source: The Verge)