That was 5 months after Masayasu Ito of Sony talked to Japanese media about a possible upgrade model for PS4 in Oct. 2015
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/news-rumours-playstation-4-orbis-spin.53566/page-282#post-1880159
This requires way too many assumptions to consider this interview a strong link and you're conveniently ignoring the XBOX side of the story.
Once again, a 'possible' upgrade model could mean _anything_ and also mean _nothing_ at all.
MS has a weaker console and they have data on their own customer base.
MS had been on an entire journey of rebuilding their brand since launch.
Removing Kinect and steering away from TV.
With each progressive E3, XBOX has been moving back towards gaming.
Phil Spencer talks about iterative consoles.
We know that MS had been working on 2 consoles in parallel.
MS officially announced their XBO One S
MS then officially announces 1 hour later, Scorpio, and sets a date for it's release in holiday 2017.
at this point in time:
There is no official news on PS4 Slim or PS4 Pro.
There are no official specs on PS4 Slim or PS4 Pro.
Neither would be officially announced in any capacity until Sept of later that year.
MS is still working blind, it's pretty clear that they did not build a business case off unofficial specs and rumours about Sony's console.
We have a _FULL_ render of the board.
We see 12 GBs of RAM.
we calculated the 384 BUS
Very little had changed from that render, to the reveal, intact nothing has changed except some markings on the board.
So you're telling me between Oct 2015 - June 2016, they managed to
a) build a case off a Sony interview
b) go to Satya and convince him that this is where XBOX needs to go because Sony is going there
c) get funding
d) talk with all developers about what they need to do to beat Sony's box? nothing about 4K... nothing about resolution gate... no... that's not something they have a problem with.
e) then profile all the XBO games and figure out what they need hardware wise to beat Sony
f) create their board render and specs and have them ready to go
all in 9 months?
Common. Be real here. Most hardware companies have a great deal of many SKUs being built and designed all in parallel, each one has a different release date.
MS didn't get this far being that incompetent, their company would be nearly dead or the luckiest company in the world to react so late and have such solutions on tap.
Considering the size of MS, it's amazing that they'd be able to iterate faster and bigger than most agile companies if all of this were to be believed; I get that you're paranoid about MS and defensive about Sony, but MS being able to react like this and this swiftly is frankly giving them way too much credit.
Like way too much credit.
This is unheard of level of speed and precision for a corporation this size.
You clearly do not know the shit show leading up to the launch of XBO. You want to see a rushed MS? There's a power brick sitting outside OG Xbox One for a reason.
and then... well there's this interview that just released today:
Microsoft’s Xbox One turns four this year. Before the year is out, the company plans to provide its aging console with a beefier, more capable sibling: Project Scorpio.
It’s been about a year since news of the company’s plans to breathe new life into the brand
leaked, but Xbox chief Phil Spencer traces Scorpio’s roots back to 2014, shortly after he stepped up from head of Microsoft Studios to
become head of Xbox.
“It was pretty close after that that we started on what our hardware roadmap was gonna be,” Spencer told Gamasutra during a recent visit to Microsoft. “The ideas behind [the Xbox One] S were in flight slightly, because we knew we would do something in terms of a hardware refresh. But in terms of something more powerful, that kind of came in at that time.
