Why The PS4 Won’t Have A Disc Drive: What The Rise Of The Tablet PC Has Taught Us About Legacy Technology
App stores are everywhere, and each and every manufacturer is competing to grab a slice of the pie. What does this mean for the PS4? Will it have a disc drive? This article thinks not. Here’s why.
Apple has recently made a big scene of declaring disc drives – once the staple for portable media transfer – as ‘legacy technology’. Looking at it academically, it’s easy to see why: discs are less durable and can hold less than USB drives, cloud hosting is doing away with the need for portable media anyhow, and most files previously only available in disc-format (such as music, films and games) are now being distributed happily over cloud services instead. But discs still hold a popular obsession: we see the gently wafers of data as somehow inviolate, unchangeable and possess-able.
Nowhere would this be more deeply felt than in Sony itself. Having won the hard battle of Blu-ray vs HD-DVD against all manners of archetypal competitors, getting rid of a disk drive would seem to be a strange move for the Japanese corporation. Moreover, with the recent (highly-publicized) struggles Sony’s PlayStation Network – its premier digital distribution service – has suffered as regards data protection and customer payment details, surely the company might feel its best to put its popular psychological stock in something as timeless as a disc. Not so.
If Sony decides to go for disc-distribution in addition to digital downloads – which is what it offers at the moment – it condemns itself to another 8 years of distributing a medium that may well be dead on its feet. today. It’s not just about portability, it’s about being seen to be embracing the times – and they are, as Dylan sang, a-changing. The PS4 is going to be a great machine, no denials – but it needs to have the ‘futuristic edge’ over its competitors. Disk drives will only hold it back.
One final word here is on portability. Many rumors have suggested that Sony will ditch the living-room model of the PlayStation entirely, instead opting for a hybrid portable/dock model, or ditching the mains power requirement altogether. In this case, disk drives are obviously going to be right out. Why? Take a look at the tablet computer market. Digital distribution has become the staple fare of tablet computers, and that doesn’t just contribute to their portability. It’s allowed companies to build entire ecosystems of application distribution, manufacture and device specificity. It allows the organisation to tie customers in to its ‘walled garden’. Sony made the mistake of letting Apple jump them in to the digital music distribution market years back, with iTunes – they won’t be letting them do that again.
