Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
The only thing is an obnoxious warranty void sticker that delaminates if you don’t lift it carefully but even then I don’t think it’s legal to void the warranty with a sticker (Switzerland, bought from a EU retailer)
There are three flexes in just this one iFixit photo of one side of a Switch Lite: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/sbTwHYTEZOaWX3IQ.f...
Tape takes a number of forms. Holding down flexes to manage pull-out forces is pretty common. You can do that with traditional single-sided tape if you have the space on something to adhere it, but increasingly common is a double-sided tape on the flex itself. You peel off a liner and stick it down. It wouldn't surprise me if there are liner-less heat-activated tapes too, but I don't know of them myself. That's outside my domain.
The spiky-ended tweezers will damage an FFC though.
Really? That's fascinating to me, given how accurate pick'n'place robots are. I would have thought they required similar capabilities.
Cables and tape are not as uniform and have a tendency to move in random directions.
I'm sure someone's probably already thought of this, but couldn't you deal with that by having two manipulators that hold the cable by both ends while keeping a small amount of tension on it? The cable could be picked up by dispensing it through a narrow U-shaped hole (to stop the loose end for grasping), or by gluing one end to a dispenser reel then having the one of the manipulators follow the cable to the other end like a person would pull a rope through their fingers.
Basically it’s unlike software and that might be where he stumbled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/opinion/andy-groves-warni...
If that's the case, then aren't they using it for Model 3/Y already? If yes, then I have to disagree with you, because neither of those cars look anything like Cybertruck, even stylistically.
EDIT: thanks for explanation in the replies, it makes sense. If anyone has any additional insight as to how it affects production lines that are, let's say, 90% automated and 10% manual, your contribution would be heavily appreciated.
https://www.assemblymag.com/articles/94982-lights-out-automa...
Maybe with the AI vision recognition systems being developed now, that such a robot will become available in the future.
Very surreal to think about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity
Early in the game, you'd hack machines to run mechanical-turk style jobs to earn money. Later you'd build a factory to manufacture more processors... ;)
Some of the first bitcoin faucets had captchas to “reduce spam”, as in prevent humans from getting too much free bitcoin, but really the captcha was a real captcha that a bot was stuck on, and was just paying humans to solve them to access some greater bounty
Pretty sure at the time the cost was something like .013 cents per solve. I always wondered who the people sitting there doing that were or what their situation was.
It went from 0 captchas per day to 10000 captchas/day over the course of about a month with just word-of-mouth. Then the upstream service just quit paying me with no explanation. My accuracy rates were good. Maybe latency was high? I don’t know why they terminated it. But I struggled to keep the users while finding a replacement, and in the end I shut it down.
On the one hand, I’m bummed, because that thing could have mostly run itself and made a tidy profit for someone still pursuing a degree. On the other hand... maybe it was for the best: 90% of captcha solving work is paid for by spammers who make the internet worse.
Would you be willing to accept or at least corroborate that cryptocurrency mining is one of the cleanest sectors and a boon for sustainability?
70-80% of that energy use is renewable energy or reducing pollution - specifically hydrocarbons. So existing energy is not being wasted or reallocated, and additional unclean energy is not being ramped up to facilitate mining, and previously wasted energy that was going into the atmosphere is now being used.
The educated discussion is to make sure it stays this way. As nation states are the only actors that could mine at a loss with inefficient ways.
Downloading singularity-1.00-win.zip from https://github.com/singularity/singularity/releases/tag/v1.0... also fails.
Edit: Cylance doesn't like the main exe. I think Cylance is full of shit.
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/39e13204ff3dea8b00a93f73...
>Download 1.00, released 07-04-2020
Mindblowing that this is still under active development after all this time. I can't wait to get home and play it to see what's changed.
[1] https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/the-gig-eco...
Seven years production run (or more), that should explain a lot. Even if hardware revisions changed significantly in that time (I wouldn't know) that's still a completely different calculation than something that changes annually, or even twice a year, as Sony's own Xperia phones used to.
Early lights out production. The problem became obvious a little later, for NeXT, which was that these things only make sense at very high scale for products that change infrequently.
Not sure if NeXT was a pioneer in those techniques, but they seemed standard by the late 1990s and 2000s.
Their golden days were during the first cellphone boom. Back then, the level of integration was lesser, and you had more discrete components on more smaller boards, and volumes were of course very high during the boom time.
Now, you can have a "dumphone" made with just 30 parts on the pcb, and very few passives.
From my experience over the decade, people running factories came to love having multiple, cheaper mounters, and more lines.
The "superboard" concept is also seem to be waning, as you see more, and more individual boards in products like smartphones. It makes for less manufacturable designs, but additional labour expense is not dramatic.
I'm amazed that Sony let out detailed pictures of the cable connecting operation. Looks like they use both a camera and a force feedback wrist.
Insert meme "Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time"
But I still have one somewhere in a cupboard.
But bandwidth is not quite the same as throughput either, so I'll answer your question genuinely. Bandwidth typically refers to the actual channel capacity for a single link. Maybe that's your PCIe lane, your wifi channel or your HDRadio channel. The bandwidth is often measured as the spectral width of the channel in frequency. But those channels include some coding for error detection or compression.
Ultimately what matters most is what kind of throughput the channel can deliver. This is the metric that is often measured in bytes or bits per second. A one gigabit Ethernet card is intended to deliver one gigabit/sec of throughput with the Ethernet channel coding. So if you hooked up a test device to your NIC it should be able to drive frames through an otherwise unoccupied channel at one gigabit/sec. But to keep the example interesting, end-users would generally measure throughput with all the added layers of coding and protocol provided by a network stack. The term "bandwidth" is much more nebulous when someone uses it to describe traffic spanning various buses and network media. I'd take context clues and assume that this usage of the term is somewhat like throughput. Though perhaps you could consider the independent physical channels as a single logical one and extrapolate some kind of conceptual bandwidth?
Sorry, starting to ramble a bit at the end there but I think you may get the gist.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9890914/valves-steam-con...
Thanks for posting this! Very entertaining to watch indeed :)
Anyone thinking they should always use a steam controller over a 360 controller for pure controller didn't understand the point of it.
Maybe I didn't give it enough time but it definitely didn't do that for me. I gave up trying to use it as a mouse replacement and as a normal controller. Here's a video of Internet Superstar Rich Evans solving that problem much more effectively [0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89qQy-rEUgg&feature=youtu.be...
Look- if I don't want to sit in front of my computer but want to be in front of a big screen (projector in my case).. that's because I want to be able to sit back and relax.
Holding a controller I can sitback and relax, my wrist is not moving all over the place. I'm basically stationary except for my fingers. That is HUGE for me as I otherwise sit infront of a computer all day.
How in the world do you get comfortable sitting on a couch trying to use a keyboard and mouse to play a game?
I got some Satisfactory vibes out of it.
https://vdata.nikkei.com/en/newsgraphics/sony-playstation/
(The content is different, though both articles cover the same topic. A bit weird)
A "lights out" factory needs a really expensive, complex widget to make, but one which doesn't vary, or change over time much.
Game consoles are exactly like: long product life times, and can be engineered specifically with automated lines in mind, without compromises.
Robotic factories are by no means a final solution for manufacturing.
Robotic factories are by no means a final solution for manufacturing...Yet
Now I am intrigued about what high selling electronic devices are manufactured in their home country itself and not by the ODMs/CMs in countries with cheap labour like China.
Shipping stuff is pretty cheap, but distributing the supply chain and creating multiple factories making the same product is incredibly expensive.
Let's say you have a hard drive supplier. Now rather than the supplier shipping to 1 factory, there are 5. Freight rates are going to be higher because you have a lower volume. Increased demand on one continent means you need the right balance of material going to that factory rather than simply upping the order for your single factory. Incorrect sales forecasts now mean you have inventory in Europe but need it in the US. You either need to pay to move it, try to get your suppliers to reroute things (always for a fee), or build finished units and ship them to the US, potentially facing higher tariffs than shipping in components [1]. Inventory costs are higher while you figure this all out, and you have increased logistics costs.
You're paying a (bigger) team of people to manage this, and expediting shipments as needed (likely at 3-10x normal cost depending on how expedited, market demand for shipping, etc).
Then there's product consistency. Even if you order identical equipment and keep all the same suppliers, you'll have different issues at each facility. Sharing best practices around the world is challengings and frequently done poorly. [2]
Then you have tariffs and government regulations. If you were 0.25% of GDP for a country, you can go to the government and lobby harder than if you're 0.05% of GDP in 5 different countries. [3]
-- [1] https://hts.usitc.gov/current offers some light trading if you want to find tariffs for the US. They're incredibly detailed, and the smallest difference could change from a 2% tariff to 60%.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax is also interesting.
[2] I know of a distributed manufacturing setup where two "identical" factories have significantly different quality outputs. The best rationale they've come up with is a difference in altitude and climate.
Corporations who have distributed manufacturing like this often have a corporate team who travel between locations checking how well locations are adhering to the company defined best practices.
[3] Definitely don't discount this step! I've worked for 4 manufacturers professionally, and I know for a fact 3 of them have pushed for tariffs and exemptions from regulations. #4 likely did too, but I don't have a specific example in mind. In each case, the difference in profits were 7 or 8 digits long.
For the product consistency, I assume you are talking about non-fully-automated factories? With full automation "adherence to best practices" hopefully shouldn't be as hard to ensure, I hope.
For tariffs, if we assume that a big part of the specific industries playes are distributed internationally, the size of the industry in general should be the much more significant factor, as you are not lobbying individually anyway, right? If you can even go as far as fluidly shift production between countries you should be to negotiate better lobbying deals, which I understand is how the automotive industry operates to some degree?
Automation certainly helps, but there are quirks and hiccups you could run into. Let's say you built a factory every 5 years. Along the way some machinery vendor goes out of business. You might or might not have the machine design, the rights to make another version, etc.
As you build out, you figure out things that work well or don't work well, and you make adjustments to your process accordingly. Building every factory identically or at the same time is probably a bad choice unless everything is really well fleshed out. The marginal benefits of upgrading older factories to the new standard is rarely economically viable.
>For tariffs, if we assume that a big part of the specific industries playes are distributed internationally, the size of the industry in general should be the much more significant factor, as you are not lobbying individually anyway, right? If you can even go as far as fluidly shift production between countries you should be to negotiate better lobbying deals, which I understand is how the automotive industry operates to some degree?
The actions I've seen (not limited to former employers) include CEO's meeting with high level federal government officials, getting local property tax exemptions for expansions bringing jobs, and collaborative industry group action about unfair dumping of product on the US market.
Remember each manufacturer in an industry group has a different structure. Some things are good for the industry as a whole, and some are more beneficial for one manufacturer than another. CEO's advocate for their own company too, not limiting public actions to trade group actions.
--
Previously I hadn't covered capital expenditure. Building factories is super expensive and tooling factories is also super expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if the facility and tooling would run 100M-500M.
Even in manual assembly, you'd have jigs and tools to buy, go/no-go guages, etc.
I have two Crucial BX500 SSDs here.
One made in Thailand - The 960GB version.
One made in Mexico - The 1TB version.
Minor point on this great post, it would actually be 0.01% instead of 0.05%, because the amount in each country is divided by 5x, but the GDP is also increased 5x, for a 25x percentage decrease.
Not really. You went from negotiating with one country to negotiating with one country of the same size (just 5 times). In an individual negotiation you are still facing a single equivalent country (with no GDP increase).
People may think that simple, generic items may gravitate to competitive markets, but with modern manufacturing equipment, even very small factories can have sky high productivity.
At around 2014, I was working on arranging manufacturing for one netbook design, and I went to South China to pick suppliers for mechanical parts.
A company called RKX hinge was the biggest notebook, and cellphone hinge maker in the world with more than half of global market share. To my surprise, they did not have a website at the time, not even a sign on the door.
They were a small, 2 storey factory in Baoan, with an office on the factory floor, and "a warehouse space" made of dangerously tall pyramids of boxes in the corner of shop floor.
The largest high quality AC to DC power supply manufacturers used to all be Taiwanese companies. And they manufactured in Taiwan. At some point about twenty years ago with increasing wages, benefits and cost of living in Taiwan they started looking seriously at opening factories in mainland China and other places. Delta, for instance, has a big factory in a low-wage-area of Thailand. Now instead of going for full robotic automation and continuing to make power supplies in Taiwan, most of them are made by more manual labor intensive processes in places with much lower wages.
The top ten Taiwanese x86 motherboard manufacturers also did the same.
Served me well when buying a guitar and amp.
Can anyone else support this? Does the type of manufacturing outlined above play an important role?
I'm currently looking to expand my guitar collection (from 1 to 2!)
The Pacifica was a bit hard to find. I think the next batch is shipping in early August from what I can tell.
r/guitar and r/guitarlessons are good resources.
Some are made by Sony EMCS, some by Foxconn and so on. Whether the PlayStation company let's them manufacture by one of Sony's own OEMs or a third party company is usually a matter of which OEM has the best offer.
Sony normally uses their own OEMs for the first batches, for low-volume products and for domestic products.
So you have, say, Olympus designing some lenses, software, and bodies, outsourcing some lens design (probably to Sigma - it's something of a closely guarded secret, although it seems all the major camera companies outsource at least some of their lens designs), outsource some of their manufacturing to other countries, while some remains in Japan.
As to why, check out Yongnou's EF-mount 50/1.8 and 35/2 lenses and you'll see why Japanese manufacturers want to keep their designs as far away from China as they can.
I'm mostly building it for myself but I thought other people may enjoy.
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but, especially the first task, seems rather trivial compared to what they achieved with their robots? Even the second one, If I remember correctly Amazon does/did this manually because every single package is different and no robot flexible enough, but I assume in Sonys case packages are all exactly the same. Doesn't sound a whole lot harder than plugging in the cables.
So why wouldn't they automatize those steps as well?
Automation is improving at a rapid rate though. I've definitely seen automated boxers for some simple to load items start to show up.
>“If you keep watching them long enough, they will start to look like humans,” said one engineer. The look in his eye is gentle like a father watching over his children. Unlike large robots that lift heavy items, the delicate movements of compact robots resemble those of human arms and have surprising warmth.
Were we immediatly think Skynet, they see something that helps them.
That seems.... slow? I mean, I have no idea what I expected, but 2 a minute, is that really fast for this type of manufacturing? How does that compare to Xbox or maybe iPhone output? I'm sure 2 a minute is really impressive, but I started reading that thinking something like hundreds or thousands an hour, I guess I was naive.
> In this area of 31.4 meters by 6 meters, it takes just 30 seconds for a team of 32 robots to build a PS4.
So presumably there is more than one PS4 going through the pipeline at once for more than 1 per 30 seconds.
525,600 minutes per year * 2 units/minute = 1,051,200 units per year (assuming 100% uptime)
There has to be at least a dozen manufacturing lines to meet yearly demand of over 10 million. https://www.statista.com/statistics/222403/unit-sales-of-son...
It's almost certainly 30 seconds part-to-part, taking 16 minutes (minus 30 seconds for each of the stations that have two or more robots) from the start to the end of the line. It's not particularly important how long it takes from the start to the end of the line, and they'd be unlikely to share that trivia with a journalist - but part-to-part cycle time is important.
If the TAKT time demanded a completed unit every second, they'd run multiple lines.
The other article, kindly linked in one of the replies, states the following:
"In this area of 31.4 meters by 6 meters, it takes just 30 seconds for a team of 32 robots to build a PS4. "
But what the article is talking about is the throughput - one finished very 30 seconds - doesn't mention how long each takes to make start to finish.
A throughput of one every 30 seconds is only a million per year. They have sold 100 million PS4s.
Just because one little thing went wrong, you don’t stop the entire production line.
My guess is that they have 12+ parallel lines.
EDIT: another commenter points out that another version of the article does indeed say 30 seconds to complete one unit, as opposed to “one unit per 30 seconds”
How would that even be possible? Also what's are the start and end state here? Just pure assembly? Surely printing the PCBs can't possibly take a fraction of 30s. Neither can placing and SMD soldering the components.
I'd think that 30 seconds would be how long 1 PlayStation takes to be assembled, but that there would be a new one every few seconds coming out of the line.
It's a pipeline. 30 seconds per build, but not 30 seconds between each console.
Just a few humans were present to deal with a handful of tasks -- two to feed bare motherboards to the line, and two to package the finished consoles.
But more fundamentally: factories often have more than one line.
A sizeable 6-axis robot like those used here has a minimum cycle time of a second or two for the simplest possible "move in, place the thing, move out" operation. They're not ultralight delta or SCARA bots, they're about as fast as a human can control their arm. Also, there's a second or two lost while the pallets moves along and are parked at the multiple stations along the line, you want to design the system to maximize the ratio of useful on-station time to transition time.
The line is bottlenecked by the slowest process. You can make a slow station run in parallel - as in the photo at [1] with the 16 stations arrayed around the robot - but that adds a lot of complexity. I'd assume that their requirements were to accommodate up to ~8 minutes for burn-in testing at that station, and that by the empty stations, the software guys ended up only using 4 minutes. You can't make the whole line wait that long, so you spend the extra effort and introduce extra complexity by buffering parts there, but now your process has forked and needs to be merged again - really a pain for tracking suspect parts or tools. All that matters is that you unload each pallet before it needs to move on and replace it with a completed part.
Some stations may be doing nothing but running a 5 second electrical test. If there's some station that has to pick up a cable, photograph it, analyze it, contort it by rotating robot joints through large angles, plug it in, and get out of the way, that could easily take 10 seconds. Others may have a human who needs to keep up. Others might be heat-staking a plastic component and need time to blow on the stake until it cools enough to be unclamped. Others might have multi-headed tooling and can connect several different parts all at once. 30 seconds is a nice middling part-to-part value if you've got a few complex operations, a few human operations, and don't want heavy robots slinging your expensive parts around at high speed. I wouldn't have been surprised at a 10-second cycle time, but 30 seconds is still reasonable.
A final consideration is that you don't want an entire factory dependent on a single line. If you want to produce thousands of parts an hour, it's much, much better to have 10 identical lines that work at a 30-second cycle time than a single line frenetically thrashing to put out out parts in 3 seconds. If one line goes down, you still have 90% capacity, and can probably catch back up. If your single line goes down, you're in big trouble.
[1]: https://s3-ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com/psh-ex-ftnikkei-3937...
I work in automation, but of biological processes (vaccines) and we have the same production issues with bottlenecks/capacity planning/down-time mitigation, etc.
Specialising your tools or machines comes at a cost: inflexibility, specifically changeover time between different products. If your machine can only do exactly one thing, the changeover time is "physically replace the machine", which may mean a delay of months.
Changeover time is a massive, hard-to-see drag on everything in a factory. The ideal manufacturing machine station can instantly switch its use between any two consecutive products moving along the line. Physically impossible, but ideal. Fully-programmable robots are much closer to that ideal than single-purpose machines.
That said, the tradeoff depends on the product/process spectrum. Some products are produced in "job shops", meaning an extremely flexible, high-touch environment, turning out very short runs. Others are worker-paced or machine-paced (which is what the Playstation factory would count as), mostly this is used for consumer goods. These still retain some flexibility, as much as sensibly possible.
At the far end are "continuous process" plants. These are very specialised to the product. Bottling plants, chemical plants, oil refineries and so on, where flexibility is not a highly meaningful advantage and the product lends itself to being treated as an undifferentiated flow as opposed to discrete units of product.
I recommend Matching Supply with Demand by Cachon & Terweisch as a first book to read. Then follow with the more in-depth Factory Physics by Hopp & Spearman.
I visited the BMW factory in Munich back in 2015; at the time it was manufacturing mostly the 3-series models (not sure now).
It was a generally fascinating experience; the most interesting piece of trivia was that, when scheduling the build order, they try very hard to avoid putting station wagons ('Touring' model) back-to-back.
This was because the build-time of the rear-window assembly on the station wagon took significantly longer than other models due to the rear wiper, and that you would get a literal pipeline stall if you had to do too many together.
Is your educational background in Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering?
I’ve always found programming robots to be fascinating. And especially when building a robot to build other robots. I’m sure others will be interested in learning of this as well.
You can, however, learn the control systems by grabbing and reading the manuals. Look for manufacturers then seek out manuals. Many are online though they are often not the latest edition as some manufacturers now seek to keep this internal to paying customers.
All the systems I have seen use G-Code variants with manufacturer specific extensions. Many now offer GUIs to help with spatial planning, multi-machine integration, common code generation, etc. However, at the end of the day it is still nearly all about generating/writing/modifying/replaying stored G-Code.
One of the most important parts of my education learning that there is no black magic in technology. Everything we manufacture is a pyramid that builds complexity using leaky abstractions. At the lowest levels, you have atomic physics of doped silicon and charge carriers. At the highest levels of abstraction, you interact with those atoms by saying "Hey, Siri, do I need an umbrella today?" Someone, somewhere, either understands or wrote a tool that understands every layer between those two. We're a few decades out from the time when someone could think about the whole stack all at once.
If you want to really program robots, you need to understand a bit of the technology with which they're built (encoders and servomotors, control loops, motion planning, real-time operating systems) and then just pick up a teach pendant, and apply what you know. Do be aware of the value in abstractions, and don't try to reinvent the wheel, but if you don't know the fundamentals you'll be tripped up every time the abstraction leaks a little.
I didn't touch a PLC or robot until after college when the job required it. It's true that working effectively is all about familiarity the toolsets provided by various manufacturers, but I don't think that would be an effective thing to teach in a university setting. If you posted a listing for a recent graduate controls job requiring experience in your particular flavor of robots or PLCs, you're going to have a bad time - anyone with a CS/CE/EE/ME background could do it. Learn how to work, learn how to learn, learn how to plan, and by that time picking up a teach pendant and getting the robot to run a loop from point A to B and back to A will be the easy part.
Gamers Nexus: How Motherboards Are Made (2019) | Taiwan Automated Factory Tour, ft. Gigabyte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnAFTMaS5R0
A company like Apple may not have the wherewithal or impetus to do something like this. When they need manufacturing, they are resigned to the traditional approach: China. Since labour is cheap there, and they just may not be thinking in these terms and may not have the wherewithal either ... the cost-effective solution invariable involves high labour intensity.
It may very well take factories like this to inspire other organisations to have the necessary 'Eureka!' moment to grasp that they too, might be better off 'fully automated' as well.
Note the eye-watering scale of the business however, quoted at nearly $100 Billion in sales, which is rather a lot of money indicating that it may take a product with a very long life cycle wherein there are considerable profits for this to be feasible.
Looking at this, one has to wonder why Western nations are not more keen to duplicate.
You mention Apple. The iPhone SE 2 is basically "iPhone 11 guts in an iPhone 8 shell" – and as I understand it Apple went to software to handle things like the camera so they could keep the older generation optics and not change the body. That type of tick/tock cadence would support this nicely.
In my opinion the second best console is the PS2. I love Nintendo but they're more like toys than hard core gaming and entertainment machines. PS2 up until PS4 was pretty much the pinnacle, but I think the way PS4 improved upon it is the development platform, and the online experience (which even so does require some improvement). I still play games on the PS2 from time to time and they still feel viable as offline single-player experiences and I could imagine development for the PS4 could continue for 20 years or so and still be producing great and relevant games.
Where to from here? VR is one obvious route but may I suggest a HN-friendly alternative? Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves? I think in order for this to be viable in terms of protecting the profitability and stability of the ecosystem there are some business and technical challenges but I would love to see them take this direction. They've dabbled before with the Yaroze system and Playstation Linux … both had their business operational issues but hardly insurmountable?
EDIT - can't respond below any more so I just have "one more thing" to say:
> PS4 is famous for being the cheapest sony home console relatively speaking
and what exactly is the problem with that? This is a feature not a bug. The PS3 was a novel system with exotic hardware but it suffered from some very serious flaws. It's reliance on proprietary technologies meant it was harder for developers to work with. It never took off as a result and is little more than a footnote in the lineage's history. A learning experience if you will.
Surely an extension of making something easier for professional developers to get to grips with is making something that hobby developers (and other classes of creative) can get to grips with?
When my PS4 Pro is playing stuff like TLOU2, it sounds like it's going to start hovering off my TV cabinet.
I have the CUH-7200 PS4 Pro model which is apparently the quietest model and it's insane how loud that thing gets when I played TLOU2.
The copying times for updates/patches is equally bad with downloading taking a few minutes and copying times taking more than 20mins. There's clearly alot of room for improvement - At least Sony have realised this as the PS5 will have a SSD instead of a HDD.
I have read many complaints online of people calling the PS4 noisy. I have a PS4 slim, and it is very quiet, the optical drive is by far the loudest part of the machine.
As others have said, they fixed it in later revisions of the hardware. :)
The newest PS4 slim is silent and TLOU2 graphics are still incredible.
We could even call these novel x86 devices "personal computers".
I don't remember the specifics apart from the GPU being inaccessible which just made it a PowerPC server. But i suspect that experience killed off the idea internally for quite a while.
Maybe it would be a last resort if the Playstation does lose out to game streaming (not that i think it will).
And there was an official home-brew kit for the PS1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze
The appeal of a console is that it's an appliance - you can just plug the thing in, not worry about any of the technicals, and go play games with minimal fuss. If you are an enthusiast of such things and inclined to tinker, I think making a Mini-ITX PC to stuff under your TV mostly effectively already covers this niche? You can pick out your parts to your liking, it will be small, it can run Linux, play VR, and be programmed and customized effectively to however much of your system you can grasp.
And Sony, who has spent like 80 years making locked down media formats for their consumer audio/video/gaming appliances that compete against industry standard formats, is unlikely to ever be the company that makes an open gaming platform.
How is this state much different from installing Steam on a PC with a couple controllers and sticking it in your living room, besides the C64 being extremely cheap and (as far as I know) not as customizable?
PCIe slots can carry you pretty darn far, and if you can use a Genesis cartridge, you can upgrade a PCI slot. For instance, on mine I added: USB 3.2, an NVMe slot, and a new graphics card. If I wanted to, I could throw in a faster network card. I could easily use the latest generation graphics cards without issue. I can play a game with at least 60fps in 4K. The only thing that really limits you is the CPU socket and the memory. Even then, after a few years you can throw in the highest end (or near highest end) server CPU for dirt cheap and some better and larger sticks RAM for not so bad a price either.
> The appeal of a console is that it's an appliance - you can just plug the thing in, not worry about any of the technicals, and go play games with minimal fuss.
Also there was certainly a chasm in capability between the 386 and c64 but the games weren’t there and you would have had to spend a lot more. At that stage anyway we had Amiga which really wasn’t surpassed by PC architecture until maybe the late 90s
Aside: Voice controls got a lot worse with Cortana than what was available in the Kinect, not that anyone cares about that in 2020. ‘Xbox pause’ was magical in 2012. Universal search was better in Xbox 360, too.
I don’t know why they took such a major step backward with the new design, but everything got a lot more slow, clunky, and difficult to use. Made the whole thing feel like a downgrade.
what you're describing are network issues. the internet is slow!
I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM
When i enter the notification quick tab it takes 30-40 seconds to show the message I've received, then another 10-15 to accept it.
Currently one single game, COD:MW consumes the entirety of the space on the device. From launch it wasn't ever going to be enough. You need to keep <x> space free because the update->patch->relink process needs to duplicate the game.
The menu system is also insane and makes no sense.
The PS4 Store App has to be one of the most poor implementations of something so simple i have ever seen. And despite enabling every level of security possible i still get DM spam that could be detected by a python 1 liner.
On the COD:MW lobby screen alone the console appears to turn into a 747 on take off.
Games are frame locked at 60fps - awful by PC standards and in a world of crossplay, a disadvantage. Performance limitations also limit FOV settings etc etc.
The controller battery life is terrible and it doesn't have bluetooth audio.
> may I suggest a HN-friendly alternative? Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves?
Could call it a PC or something.
Means nothing though, where is the software? These supposedly dated and under-powered machines are still where the production of some of humanities not only most ambitious art of the last 100 years but most profitable art is being produced.
There's a very common complaint that COD requires double the game size free space to download updates, regardless of the update size itself. This is ridiculous and not something that is common to other games.
They really, really didn't. And still don't. And won't for a good while yet.
Cell phones work in a power envelope that is basically 1/50th of what PS4 uses. Assuming that power consumption/unit of work done drops by half every two years (and it doesn't), it would take a decade for a PS4 in a cell phone power envelope to become feasible.
The very newest cell phones have GPUs with more raw compute power than the PS4, however they still typically have less than half the memory bandwidth, and that raw compute power is only usable for very short bursts.
I'd like to see that phone. The PS4 was slightly weaker than my AMD 7870 at the time. If I could get the performance of a 7870 on a laptop without a discrete GPU that would be amazing.
Turns out it's grim. Even a snapdragon 855 doesn't even reach a single TFLOP... [0] If you want to wait until the end of July you can get a phone that breaks the first TFLOP (snapdragon 865)
Meanwhile the ancient 7870 had 2.56 TFLOPS (which is what I am equating the PS4 with). Twice the performance of the unreleased snapdragon.
Going from 4 years ago to a GPU that hasn't even been released yet not even scratching the performance of a PS4 turns your entire comment into a big disappointment.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qualcomm_Snapdragon_sy...
Not even close, in fact PS4 is famous for being the cheapest sony home console relatively speaking. PS3 costed more and was sold with losses.
PS4 was made with very cheap hardware in mind, and the next generation seem to be committed to cheapness as well. For those prices a PC gets better hardware and well, it's also counts as a PC.
Even a PS4 Pro is weaker than a One X, and both are behind a cost effective PC. and most games don't even run at a 60 fps which used to be the case 2 generations ago. Worse than not running at 60 is stuttering, for most games 30 is more than enough, but when the console can't keep that rate it is annoying to see framerate drops.
Some of us really love our toys. Playing MarioKart or Super Smash Bros. with my kid makes both of us happy. I used to have a PS2 and owned quite a collection of titles but I think playing Nintendo games is a joyous experience that PS2 and its titles never delivered.
I think that you may be brining up a valid point we have a standards body to define the standards and labeling for the capacity of a gaming machine. (That would prevent games from always demanding the absolute latest hardware). However, a lot of the issues with the PS4 is you have sony trying to control _everything_ in the hen house. (Think of this like the Symbian vs Android situation) Android took off because it wasn't one manufacturer having control over the OS.
Yet iOS really started that market and maintains its customers exactly because it's a single company controlling the OS (and doing it rather well, to be fair). And while its market share isn't that of Android, it can hardly be called a failure.
That's true for any platform, isn't it?
I mean, I see your point about an open platform, but on something that's intended to 'just work' like a PS, trading openness for guaranteed working games and known-good [enough] quality is fair enough. The platform only needs to keep its side of the promise (and not be a monopoly, which would open another can of worms).
They can’t change the console capabilities, because games would not take advantage of it, as a ps4 game need to run in all ps4 versions.
If you want to upgrade the hardware, you have to launch a new product, as they are doing with ps5.
It’s all about having a stable ecosystem which allows developers to spend hundred of millions and be sure to reach all ps4 users. And milk that cow for years.
The same will happen with ps5: incredible machine at launch, obsolete within 1 or 2 years, but will remain in the market as is for 7-8 years while development houses (and users) reap the benefits of the ecosystem.
An upgrade is very much needed. Mobile phones are surpassing the current generation of consoles.
And I thought he was full of it, and PS was always very obviously just another game console, and he’s also the culprit of why PS2 fat had IEEE1394, why PS2 compatibility sucks even against its own variants, why PS3 sucked in general, why there isn’t much gap to be perceived on the chart between launch day prices of PS3 and Wii, why there were some Cell based PCIe boards that were more or less space heaters, maybe also why Vita got RAM slash, also probably why Microsoft tried digital home hub concept in XB1 only to have the always funny division chief seek for new opportunities, and his absence is probably why PS4 and PS5 are just almost completely sane no nightmare gaming consoles...
Anyway Kutaragi was the PS guy from PS1 through PS3 and I guess that’s what you’re talking about.
Granted that probably already is a thing, or isn't for good reason.
Now, this is what I call a true fabrication process.
Usually, the first batches of a Sony product are made in Japan or the ones sold domestically.
If you buy an early PlayStation 1, 2, 3 or 4 in Japan, they're usually all Made in Japan.
That API was created by Sony when something like Vulkan didn't exist yet, but today there is no good reason not to support Vulkan.