A PS4 With Upgradeable Components? Not So Fast, Exec Says

Before the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox Scorpio consoles were officially announced, there was an idea floating around that the consoles could be PC-like in that you could upgrade their components. Now that both systems have been announced, we know that's not how they're going to work.

But could that happen some day?

PlayStation president Andrew House was asked that very question by DigitalSpy in a new interview, and based on his response, don't count on it. "It's very tough for me to envisage that at this point," he said.

In related news, House recently said that part of the reason why Sony is coming out with the PS4 Pro is because he's seen data that suggests that gamers move over to PC during a certain stage in a console's lifecycle to get a high-end experience. In the new interview, House clarified that PS4 Pro is not specifically targeted at gamers would might move over to PC mid-cycle.

"The question you pose is, 'Are you the sort of player that absolutely wants the very best in terms of graphical experiences on the games that you play?' If the answer to that is, 'Yes', then I think PlayStation 4 Pro is worthy of consideration.

"By extension, what I was suggesting is that players answering 'yes' to that question inherently do tend to gravitate towards the PC, and perhaps do so at a certain point within the console lifecycle."

On the other side of the fence, Xbox boss Phil Spencer clarified that you won't be opening your Xbox Scorpio with a screwdriver to manually upgrade its components.

"Am I going to break open my console and start upgrading individual pieces of my console? That's not our plan," he said. "There is something special about what happens with a console. You buy an applicance-like device; you plug it into your TV; it works when you plug it in. It's not like I'm going to ship a screwdriver set with every console that comes out."

Read the full DigitalSpy interview with House here.

The $400 PS4 Pro, due out on November 10, sports a 1 TB hard drive and double the processing power of the standard PS4. Microsoft's Xbox Scorpio has 6 teraflops of performance, making it more than 40 percent more powerful than the PS4 Pro. The gap in performance will be "obvious," Microsoft has said. Scorpio, or whatever Microsoft decides to call it, will go on sale in holiday 2017.