The Playstation 5’s Designer Wanted It To Be Even Bigger
Just finding a Playstation 5 is part of the adventure…the other half is finding room for it. The PS5 has blatantly defied the trend in recent years of shrinking consoles, offering up the largest machine they’ve ever produced. It shatters the previous record set by the Playstation 3 at 15.4 inches in diameter.
Yujin Morisawa, the designer of the new console, hears your complaints about the size. He too thinks it is too small….wait, WHAT?
That’s right, it was supposed to be bigger. “I actually had to shrink it down a little bit from the first drawing,” Morisawa told the Washington Post. He doesn’t specify just how large this beast was supposed to be (Japan is only so large an island), but he was forced to shrink it down by the engineering departmenr.
Why’s it so big, Yujin? It’s all about displacing the large amount of heat that all those cutting-edge chips generate. “I knew it was going to be large because I know how much power there was going to be, so I knew how much airflow you would need and how much space for a heat sink,” he said. “We wanted to get it much smaller, so it’s the perfect size right now.”
As for the odd shape of it, Morisawa says it’s supposed to look organic — the opposite of the traditional boxy approach. “Sometimes it looks like a plant or some animal or some object. I think that’s more comfortable than something weird, or something that they’ve never seen before.”
The Playstation 5 will be released before the week is through, on November 12. The XBox Series X will be out a couple days before then, November 10 (hey, that’s tomorrow).