Sold out at best buy again.
My April prediction for PS5 seems it'll be good if not too late. PS5 will not be in all stores at any point in 2021, but I think it'll reach this series s state pretty soon.
Nah. Series X might, PS5 is still very hard to get. I think my prediction of May to be in the kind of state Series S is currently in won't be far off. And if its wrong it'll be too early.
As xev says manufacturing chips is hard in general right now. I don't think Microsoft would be paying to make more xboxs than they need so if series s is coming around, feels like good odds series x and PS5 will be similar. Or series s will go back into a near impossible to find item.
Series S demand is just much lower. Its already in good supply in countries like Spain where we know its 1/3 of XBS combined sales which are roughly matching XB1. And it lasted over a week on amazon UK before release with its first/ second round of stock allocation.
Put in other terms, sell through for each at the end of Dec was approx.:
PS5d 900k
Series S 1.1M
Series X 2.2M
PS5 3.5M
And Series S is the only one like this. Series X is getting closer, like when I said it lasted an hour on the MS store. PS5 though, both models, is way way off. Despite PS5 being by far the SKU with the most shipped it still sells out within minutes/ seconds everywhere, way faster than either xbox console.
PS5d has seen approximately similar supply to series S but is probably the most supply constrained out of them all right now.
TLDR: Xbox demand is very different so you can't really use it to judge anything about PS5. Series S itself is a special case.
Wouldn't that come down to contracts and manufacturing lines?
Probably isn't practical to switch a manufacturing line from making XSS to making XSX. Would probably take a lot of time and money.
Demand also isn't similar for XSX and PS5.
It is an interesting problem, they have clearly overestimated Series S demand. They're producing them in 2:1 ratio but demand seems more like the 4:1 that Playstation seem to have nailed. Perhaps they just keep the S roughly constant and if there's any future ramping to do, focus it on X.