PlayStation 5 Console Review: There Is No Slim, and It Costs 649 Dollars

Sony sells no PS5 Slim. It sells a 649-dollar 1 TB console, a 599-dollar Digital Edition and an 899-dollar Pro, all reading Currently Unavailable on Sony's own store.

Anyone shopping for a PlayStation 5 Slim is shopping for a machine Sony has never named. The hardware is real enough – it is the CFI-2000 revision that arrived in November 2023 – but Wikipedia records that the models are only colloquially referred to that way, and Sony announced them purely as revised models of the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Digital Edition. Sony’s own US store lists three products. On 1 September 2026 they read 649 dollars, 599 dollars and 899 dollars, and every one of them was marked Currently Unavailable.

Key facts

• Sony’s actual names: PlayStation 5 Console 1 TB, PlayStation 5 Digital Edition 825 GB, PlayStation 5 Pro 2 TB
• Prices on Sony’s US store, 1 September 2026: 649, 599 and 899 dollars
• All three showed Currently Unavailable; the 1 TB disc console was also marked Coming Soon
• Two US increases: August 2025 (plus 50 dollars on every unit) and 2 April 2026 (global)
• Launch to now: Digital Edition up 50 percent, disc console up 30 percent, Pro up 29 percent

Sony has never shipped anything called a Slim

The nickname attached itself to the November 2023 redesign, which was smaller than the launch machine, moved to 1 TB of storage, and split the optical drive off as a detachable part sold separately for 80 dollars. Journalists needed a word for it and shoppers repeated the word, so listings and search boxes filled up with a product name that appears nowhere on Sony’s storefront. Some outlets still use it: FlatpanelsHD writes PlayStation 5 Slim Disc and PlayStation 5 Slim Digital in its news coverage. Sony writes PlayStation 5 Console – 1 TB.

This matters more than pedantry usually does, because the shorthand collapses three separate machines at three separate prices into one imagined product. There is also a live discrepancy in Sony’s own listing worth flagging before anyone buys on storage grounds: the Digital Edition page reads 825 GB, not the 1 TB that the 2023 Digital Edition carried. Which SKU is actually shipping under that listing needs checking against the box, not against a review.

Two price rises in eight months, both blamed on the economy

In August 2022 Sony raised PS5 prices by up to 20 percent in most markets and spared the United States. That reprieve ended in August 2025, when every US PS5 unit went up by 50 dollars, with Sony citing a challenging economic environment. On 2 April 2026 a further global increase followed: in the US the Digital Edition took another 50 dollars and the Pro took another 150, this time attributed to the global economic landscape. FlatpanelsHD describes prices as having risen steadily since December 2025, with the April increase making it official.

Add it up and the direction of travel is the opposite of every previous console generation. The Digital Edition has gone from 399 dollars at launch to 599, a rise of 50 percent. The disc console has gone from 499 to 649. The Pro, which launched on 7 November 2024 at 699 dollars, now lists at 899. Consoles have historically got cheaper as manufacturing matured and the software catalogue did the selling; this one has become 29 to 50 percent more expensive without gaining a feature.

It is worth being exact about what Sony did not say. Nintendo raised the Switch 2 from 449.99 to 499.99 dollars effective 1 September 2026 and pointed at the ongoing global memory shortage. Apple, Roku and Amazon all named component costs when they moved streaming hardware prices this year. Sony named the economy in general terms on both occasions, which is a weaker explanation than its rivals offered and one that cannot be checked against a component market.

Four revisions, and only the fourth got a nickname

The machine on sale is the end of a chain of quiet hardware revisions, none of which changed what games do:

1. CFI-1000, November 2020: the launch console, 825 GB of storage of which 667 GB was usable after system files
2. CFI-1100, August 2021: a smaller heatsink, with no significant effect on cooling
3. CFI-1200, August 2022: a die shrink of the main chip that cut power consumption
4. CFI-2000, November 2023: physically smaller, 1 TB, and a disc drive that detaches and costs 80 dollars bought separately

All three models read Currently Unavailable

A review that ends by telling you where to buy something ought to check that it can be bought. On 1 September 2026 none of the three consoles could be ordered from Sony directly. The disc model carried a Coming Soon label alongside its 649-dollar price; the other two simply said Currently Unavailable.

The Pro is the tightest of the three. FlatpanelsHD reported it sold out across the United States and in many European countries as of 31 August 2026, and traced the surge to a GTA VI preview that went up on Netflix on 28 August. The base console remained easier to find at retail, but the same report flagged supply risk running into the holiday period. Anyone who finds one at list price this autumn is buying availability as much as hardware.

Sony’s own page says new games go digital-only from January 2028

Buried on the disc console’s product page is a line that changes the oldest piece of PlayStation buying advice there is. Sony states that from January 2028, newly released games on PlayStation will be available for purchase on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital format only, while discs for earlier releases stay playable on the disc-drive model.

The standard argument for paying more for the drive is used games: buy second hand, sell when finished, lend to a friend. That argument now has an expiry date attached to it by the manufacturer. It still holds for the existing library, which is enormous, and for anyone with shelves of PS4 and PS5 discs. It does not hold for the games that will be released across the second half of this console’s life. This is a single source, albeit Sony’s own, and the exact wording is worth reading on the page before anyone spends 50 dollars on the strength of it.

What a 649-dollar console has to earn back

None of this makes the machine bad. It makes the machine expensive at a point in its life when it should be cheap, and the three-way choice harder than it looks. The 50-dollar gap between the Digital Edition and the disc console is small enough that most buyers should take the drive on flexibility grounds alone, with the caveat above about what happens in 2028. The Pro asks 250 dollars more than the disc model and ships with neither an optical drive nor a vertical stand, which means its real price is higher again for anyone who wants both.

The honest position is that this is a mature console with a deep library and a price that has moved the wrong way twice, and that there was no PlayStation 6 announcement to wait for as of 1 September 2026. If the games matter enough, buy at whatever a retailer will actually ship, and treat Sony’s own store as a price reference rather than a shop. If they do not matter that much yet, the machine is not going anywhere and the price is unlikely to fall further this year.

Sources: Sony PlayStation Direct · Sony PlayStation Direct · Wikipedia · FlatpanelsHD · Wikipedia