This was the worst case scenario I had long feared with the narrow and fast approach. The amount of money you save on the silicon gets offset by a more expensive cooling solution, and you are left with a console that is just as expensive as your competition, but not as powerful.
It's a comedy of errors tbh. They wanted to launch in 2019, but didn't. Then they didnt go with a different chip and simply increased the clocks after delaying it for a year, still not enough to match the competition's tflops number. Then their bet on SSDs blew up in their face as prices went up leaving them with most likely a more expensive SSD and controller than the off the shelf ssd MS went with to reduce costs. Basically everything that could've gone wrong, did. Where as for MS, every decision they made turned out to be a genius one.
MS sacrificed RAM to save on power consumption AND costs, which allowed them to invest in a bigger silicon. Now they have a more powerful console, at least on paper, for the same price. This feels like a repeat of last gen where every decision Sony made ended up working out whereas every decision MS made from DDR3 to ESRAM resulting in a worse GPU blew up in their face. It sucks because the PS5 looks like a console designed by an engineer whereas the Series X and its focus on tflops above everything else was designed by a marketing exec. The marketing exec's design will probably end up offering better performance and might even sell better. Unfortunate but Sony should've seen this coming.
The only difference is that Sony's gimmick will help makes games better, but how many third party devs really take advantage of this ssd? I dont know if any would. I also dont see MS having supply issues. Their console is modular in design and is very easy to assemble. Their ssd isnt super custom and seems off the shelf. They should be able to ship more of these things.
Sony needs to forget about Japan. It no longer matters. It's not an important territory anymore. They just buy switch and other handheld games. They can wait. Ship those 6 million units in Europe and NA, and leave Japan for summer.