CrimsonIdol,
I don’t like this direction, but we definitely did know.
The fact that there has been no price cut on the base hardware years in, along with slim models dropping without price cuts?
We did know, or at least, we should have expected it.
I thought about it, trying to make sense of this approach from Sony, and I would say that the PS4 and PS4 Pro managed prices better because the hardware was nothing specialized. It was really standard hardware with an anaemic Jaguar CPU.
PS5 is an entirely different animal. I do believe we should have seen at least a $50-100 price cut to this point, and I’m sure that’s just greed. I think the Pro could be $700 justifiably if they packed in a disc drive and made it fully backwards compatible with every PlayStation. That would have been easier to accept.
So we definitely should have expected a higher price than $500, but how much higher is debatable.