Mole: PSP-Go details confirmed, smaller PS3 is on the way
Our trusty inside source spills the beans about Sony's long-term strategy. The PSP-Go! is real, and should be announced at E3. The more surprising news? A slimmed-down PS3 is in fact coming, but not until Sony sells the PS3s sitting on retail shelves.
Context & Ripple Effects
The PS3 slim has been circling for weeks: Kotaku published what looked like first photos of a redesigned PS3 on May 14, and an iSuppli teardown in December 2008 had already found Sony cutting costs through component integration in second-generation units. Ars Technica's Mole now confirms both rumors at once — the PSP-Go ahead of E3, and a slim PS3 whose launch is deliberately gated on selling through current retail stock.
This follows a playbook Sony knows well. In 2007 it refreshed the original PSP into the slimmer model with video output, and its own Mole reported back in January 2008 that the 80GB PS3 was dead with larger drives coming. The difference this time is sequencing: rather than announcing the new box immediately, Sony is managing down old inventory first — a sign of how much unsold PS3 hardware sits on shelves two-plus years into the cycle.
First-order effects
- Sony gets an E3 headline with the PSP-Go announcement, while the slim PS3 stays officially unlaunched until channel inventory clears — retailers holding older PS3 stock keep selling it without immediate price pressure from a newer model.
Second-order effects
- Retailers and distributors face a predictable sell-through window on current PS3 units, shaping their ordering and promotional decisions through late 2009; Microsoft and Nintendo must decide whether E3's handheld-and-slim news forces pricing or bundle responses of their own.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mid-cycle hardware redesigns become a managed cadence — cost-reduction teardowns like iSuppli's effectively telegraphing each revision — while any PSP line moving away from physical media (David Perry's UMD-free PSP2 claim remains unconfirmed) would hand Sony's digital storefront growing control over handheld software margins.
The trend: Console makers are turning mid-generation redesigns from surprise refreshes into planned inventory-management and cost-reduction cycles, with E3 as the staging ground.