WTF. Maybe they did so in Japan? I haven't been following but that would be really serious issue (and dumb beyond words).

So I guess you are offended by every ad campaign (targetted at anyone who isn't a child) going then as they are all basically driven by sex in some regard or another.

Are you not offended that Sony thinks you can be driven to buy their product by sex?

So I guess you are offended by every ad campaign (targetted at anyone who isn't a child) going then as they are all basically driven by sex in some regard or another.

I actually do get quite offended at some of those ads, particularly the ones the blatantly advertise cheating

I was hoping for next-gen hardware and not off-the-shelves PC hardware that currently exists... Besides a controller for main input (something MS games on PCs are sort of adapting to), the proprietary and cost-efficient hardware specs that beats PC performance for the next few years is what makes a console different from a PC. From what I've seen, this console can output graphical quality comparable to Battlefield 3 on PC on max settings that came out in late 2011. This console probably coming out late this year.

Consoles have never--not once--had better hardware than PCs of like era. They have had different and specialized hardware for most of their existence, to some degree or another, but console performance is outsized compared to a similarly powerful PC because their whole is greater than the sum of their parts, and further still because there is only one "whole", not the jumbled, piecemeal, every-PC-is-a-beautiful-snowflake landscape.

Recall that the original Xbox was even closer to a bog-standard PC, and how it generated graphics that no essentially identical Windows PC could dream of touching. The PS3 and 360 today are doing things that no like-powered PC could accomplish, albeit with unique architecture. The PS4 and (rumored) Xbox Next spec do cite some custom silicon, though, so they've still got some specialized grunt uniquely their own.

When you make one single hardware spec, designed for games, then cut OS and driver overhead to the bone, and then turn developers loose on it, you literally multiply the effectiveness of the hardware several fold -- not necessarily in useless benchmark numbers -- but absolutely in terms of real results.

Yeah, the hardware will be more cost-efficient than a PC, because it'll be mass produced in it's single configuation in very large production runs. It will then also outperform similarly spec'ed PC hardware, because there'll be less OS/Driver overheads than on PC, and developers will be able to spend a disproportionately large time optimizing for that single hardware specification (whereas on PC they have to optimize for endless configurations). It's still got these traits that make consoles beat out PCs.

When the PS3 launched in 06, it shipped with what was nVidia's best PC GPU at the time, but within 6 months it was no longer top-of-the-line. Anyone who has the PC equivalent of that GPU in their PC is no longer supported -- it's too slow, and lacking in features (no DX10/11) so most new games don't even bother being compatible with it any more... However, the PS3 versions of these games obviously are compatible with such a GPU, because they can get around the driver and also compensate for it's failings with the CPU, knowing exactly how much CPU power they have (on a PC, a user with this GPU will likely also have a very slow CPU, so you can't compensate).

Even if the PS4 is just a current top-of-the-line PC, it'll still be able to survive against 5 years of PC upgrades, just like the PS2 and PS3 did.

Anyway, I don't know of many PC's with GDDR5 main memory, nor an 8-core CPU... So it's a damn high spec PC.

Consoles have never--not once--had better hardware than PCs of like era.

I'd say that the PS3 shipped with a better (measured by theoretical peak performance) CPU than PC's at the time. In fact, it still beats out some CPU's from 5 years later

I think the PS4's question is whether or not it can result in an innovative gaming experience. I am impressed by the tech specs, but....I really don't know beyond that...

At this point, I think innovation is with whatever new peripheral Sony and 3rd parties decide to support. IMO, Wii U missed the boat on that one. But we'll see if Sony incorporates the Move with the neuro-headsets I've been reading about. Or even the VR helmets now being made.

I'm just hoping that this doesn't turn out to be some gimmick that has no real value to it. The touchpad thing in particular makes me skeptical....that being said, I'm impressed with the social features, but am not sure how they will figure into games.