PS Plus price hike: We'll all pay for a subscription-based future | Opinion
It's been a little while since we saw a glimpse of the Bad Old Sony – the company that priced the PS3 at $200 above its closest competitor and retorted to criticism by saying that consumers would get a second job to be able to afford the console. Remember those guys?
Subsequently playing catch-up to Microsoft for most of that generation injected a much-needed dose of humility into the company's thinking, while the discovery that the PlayStation brand didn't carry remotely enough consumer kudos to shift Nintendo from the top spot in the handheld market also helped to ground Sony's ideas a bit more firmly in reality.
In the generations that followed, Sony has generally kept its head down, focused on its game pipeline, and avoided annoying consumers too badly. The PS4 side-stepped the DRM bear-trap that the Xbox One tumbled into, for example, and the PS5 pleasantly surprised us all by allowing storage expansion with an industry standard M.2 SSD, bucking Sony's grim history with exorbitantly priced proprietary storage formats.
In the past couple of weeks, though, it feels like we've seen a couple of unwelcome flashes of the arrogant beast that Sony once was.
First there was the news that the PlayStation Portal – a curious device whose price point makes it very interesting even if its limited feature-set makes it unclear who exactly it's designed for – has eschewed Bluetooth audio for a Sony proprietary standard, forcing users to buy forthcoming Sony earbuds or headsets to enjoy wireless audio with the device.
Even Apple hasn't strayed from Bluetooth in its devices, instead building on and around the standard for its AirPods' functionality; god only knows what deep-seated delusion of grandeur has made Sony think it's in
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