Despite my desire to wait on getting a PS5, my wife really wanted one for Christmas last year and I was lucky enough to track one down for her just in time. The reason I wanted to wait is because I've been burned nearly every time I chose to be an early adopter of a newly released console. I think the only time it ever worked out were with my N64 and Wii. Unfortunately, my instincts to wait a year or two with the PS5 might have been correct.
My wife went to put in a blu-ray movie last night and low and behold the PS5 was unable to read the disc. After trying several times and it continuing not to read I recommended she try a game. Same thing. Then she tried a different game, same thing. It was clear something was wrong with the disc drive or the PS5's software. After running through many different troubleshooting methods up to completely doing a system restore on the PS5 it was clear my disc drive had failed.
However, that's not even the worst part. After doing some research online around replacing the drive, Sony decided to tie the hardware ID of each PS5's disc drive to the chipset of the specific console. In other words, you can't replace the disc drive yourself. Not being able to fix or modify my own electronics pisses me off beyond belief, and actually made me angrier than my disc drive going out in a console that's just over a year old. Oh, did I mentioned the PS5's hardware only has a 1-year warranty...
I am pretty livid right now about this, and unfortunately due to the holiday I can't get a hold of Sony to find out how much they're going to extort from me just to undue a few screws and throw in a new disc drive. This "you can't fix your own hardware" bullshit is why I stopped buying Apple products a while back, and now unfortunately Sony, and Microsoft, are doing it now too. This is so anti-consumer since they have a monopoly now on all service and repair for a product they don't even own. I own it, and I should be able to fix it, modify it, run it over, freeze it, or do whatever the fuck I want with it since I legally own it. I don't have to ask for Sony's permission to sell the PS5, why the hell should I be forced to go through them to repair it?
Sorry, I just had to rant about this. I don't honestly want to support Sony, or at least the PS5 anymore, however doing this pretty much means I'm bared from an entire generation of promising games which I'd really like to play. Unless I choose to forfeit this I don't know what other choice I have than to just take it.