Sony wants you to pay way too much for the PS5 Pro

Sony has revealed its souped-up PlayStation 5 Pro (PS5 Pro) during a live stream hosted by lead architect, Mark Cerny.

Releasing this November, the PS5 Pro features 2TB of SSD storage, an updated GPU, WiFi 7 support, AI-powered 4K upscaling, better ray tracing and no disc drive.

Most astounding, though, is Sony's confidence in the PS5 Pro, which can be observed via the $1,199.95 price tag. That is just shy of the iPhone 16, which was announced roughly 22 hours prior.

As the mid-generation update for the PlayStation 5 (PS5,) the PS5 Pro will play all the same games as the standard PS5 that was released in November 2020— it will just be a little better at playing those games. 

The PS5 Pro will cost $1,199.95 in Australia when it launches on Thursday the 7th of November 2024. Pre-orders go live on Thursday the 26th of September through 

The PS5 Pro doesn't come with a disc drive, though it is compatible with PlayStation's $159 modular Console Disc Drive that was released with the PS5 Slim. With that said, the PS5 Disc Drive isn't exactly abundant in stock in Australia; PlayStation's Amazon store is currently out of stock. So if you do need a disc drive and you're planning on getting the PS5 Pro, it's probably safest to buy a Disc Drive ahead of time, wherever you can get it. 

• Better GPU: With 67% more compute units (?)
• Double storage: The PS5 Pro will come with 2TB of internal SSD storage
• Faster memory: The PS5 Pro sports the same 16GB GDDR6 unified RAM but according to Sony the read speeds are increased thanks to the GPU upgrade
• AI 4K upscaling: The PS5 Pro will have its own version of NVIDIA's 4K upscaling technology, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling,) which Sony is calling PSSR or PlayStation Spacial Super Resolution. It's a bespoke technology designed to work with the PS5 Pro's AMD-based architecture. It's impressive tech (well, DLSS is at least,) that uses artificial intelligence to upscale video fidelity in real-time. As a software solution, and not a hardware job, this lightens the load on the GPU, leaving more room for other intensive tasks, like maintaining a higher frame rate. Don't set your expectations too high, even the official PS5 Pro announcement only hopes for better fidelity at 60FPS, despite the console trailer vaguely promising better 120FPS performance. 
• No disc drive: Despite the massive price increase, the PS5 Pro only comes as a Digital-Only console. Those who would like to use their physical library of Blu-ray PS5 discs would need to spend an extra $159 on a PS5 Disc Drive to do so (and that's if they can even find one for sale.) That ups the overall price for physical media fans to $1,358.95. 
• No vertical stand: You will also pay extra for the kickstand if you want to store your PS5 Pro upright. Cool.

Naturally, you're probably thinking about what that kind of money gets you. Sony hasn't released a comprehensive list of technical specs for the PS5 Pro yet, so you will simply have to trust that Sony wouldn't screw you over with empty promises. 

During the 10-minute announcement stream (of which many minutes were dedicated to celebrating the base PS5,) Cerny commented on a few of the upgrades but held back on solid promises about real-life improvements. He spoke a lot about increasing the fidelity in 'Performance Mode' and increasing the frame rate in 'Quality Mode' but never about eliminating the need for a choice. Just that the bad parts of both options will, hopefully, be a little better.

Cerny did comment on the fact that the data shows that most PS5 players opt for performance, so it's likely that the focus will be on improving fidelity for high-frame-rate players. 

If that shakes out then the PS5 Pro might be worth it in the long run but I would be waiting for the reviews to land before spending that much money.