So the PS4 came out this past Friday, the 15th, and by Saturday afternoon my Twitter feed was already split into two camps: people posting pictures of their console glowing blue and ready to go, and people posting pictures of their console glowing blue and refusing to do anything else. That second blue light is not the good kind. It just sits there blinking at you while the console pretends there's a TV connected when there isn't one, and no amount of unplugging and replugging fixes it.
I dont have a PS4 yet myself. I was going to grab one this week once the initial rush died down, but this whole HDMI port thing has me holding off a little, which I think is the actually interesting story here instead of another "here's what launched and how many they sold" post that every outlet already ran twice this weekend.
Here's what's going on as far as I can tell from digging through forum threads last night instead of sleeping like a reasonable adult: some chunk of launch units, small, Sony's been saying well under one percent, have a fault where the HDMI port doesn't establish a proper video signal. The console boots fine internally, the drive spins, the light goes blue like its supposed to, and then nothing shows up on the TV no matter what cable or port you try. A few people on reddit and NeoGAF took theirs apart (which voids the warranty immediately, they know that, they did it anyway because thats how badly they wanted a fix) and found what looks like a bad solder joint or a cracked port housing right at the HDMI connector. That's a manufacturing defect, not a software thing, so there's no patch coming for it. Your only real option is sending it back.
What gets me is how this is basically the same story every console launch tells, just with the details swapped out. Xbox 360 had the red ring of death. PS3 had the yellow light thing a few years later. Now its PS4's turn with blue. You'd think after this many console generations somebody in QA would flag "hey maybe stress test more of the physical ports before we ship two million of these," but rushing a hardware launch to hit a holiday date apparently just guarantees a small percentage of units slip through broken no matter how careful anyone is. I don't think this is some huge scandal, to be clear. Its a rounding-error percentage of a very complicated piece of electronics built at massive scale in a few months. I just find it funnier than the marketing copy.
The thing that actually matters more than the failure rate is how Sony's handling the replacements, and so far the answer seems to be: fine, not great. People are getting told to expect a two to three week turnaround for an exchange through Sony directly, which if you just spent $399 on a launch day console so you could play it during the one week you actually have free time, is a pretty rough answer. Retailers like Amazon and Best Buy are doing faster swaps for people who bought through them, which is the actual lesson here if youre planning to pick one up this week — buy from a retailer with an easy return window, not directly from Sony, just in case you're the unlucky one in whatever-hundred.
Separate complaint, nothing to do with hardware: the whole conversation this month keeps getting tangled up with the used-games and always-online mess from back in June, where Xbox One announced those restrictions and then walked all of them back after everyone lost their minds about it. Sony gets credit for never trying that in the first place, and I think it's genuinely part of why the PS4 launch narrative has been so much friendlier than it might've been otherwise. Goodwill built up over a summer doesn't evaporate just because a few thousand HDMI ports were soldered wrong in a factory.
Xbox One launches next Friday, the 22nd, so we'll get to do this whole comparison again in a week, this time with whatever Microsoft's equivalent hardware hiccup turns out to be, because there's always one. I'll probably have my PS4 by then. Ask me again in a month if I still like it, once the launch window games run out and its just me and the dashboard.