Sony’s PlayStation 4 ignores Post-PC era at its own peril

11 years ago

Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider, “Yesterday’s Sony’s PlayStation 4 announcement sounded like a condensed version of Apple’s keynotes from the last decade: a deemphasis of optical media in favor of digital downloads (beginning for Apple in iTunes Store 2002 and culminating in the Mac App Store in 2010, enhanced with iCloud access announced in 2011), hardware moving from the PowerPC architecture to an x86 processor (as Macs did in 2006), gesture based input (imported to the Mac from iOS in 2009), a Suspend/Resume/AutoSave architecture (unveiled for OS X 10.7 Lion in 2010), and social integration (like Apple’s Game Center and Facebook ties outlined in 2012).”

“Notably missing from Sony’s event was significant recognition of the ‘Post PC’ era that Apple has focused its attention on, beginning with the iPad’s unveiling by Steve Jobs three years ago in early 2010,” Dilger writes. “Sony already knows this Post PC shift has had a major impact on portable gaming, having felt the impact on its PlayStation Portable and its follow up, the PlayStation Vita, first hand. But it didn’t give any hint in its presentation that it recognizes Apple’s potential to deliver a new assault on living room gaming with its iOS mobile devices (as opposed to another centralized gaming console appliance), even while portraying its own efforts to expand in the “smart TV” market with a graphic that appeared inspired by Apple TV.”

Dilger writes, “Instead, Sony seemed comfortably rooted in the PC era, effectively almost ignoring Apple’s iOS App Store platform, recently highlighted as having the potential to ‘kill PlayStation, Wii U and Xbox’ by a founder of Microsoft’s Xbox gaming efforts. ”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: The last time Sony had a clue, you could still buy an $8 hot dog atop the World Trade Center.