Ten things you could buy with $700 instead of a PS5 Pro

In case Sony didn’t actually dispatch cyborg ninjas to inform you personally, we’d like to mention that the new PlayStation 5 Pro is going to be available as of September 26 — well, at least you’ll be able to pre-order them online via direct.playstation.com. Then general pre-orders will begin on October 10, 2024, which is when I think a lot of us will look at the $700 USD price tag and suck in a startled breath. Especially since, as many people have pointed out, this is a console without any means to use physical game discs. No external games for the PS5, and if you want to use a game you own via a physical disc, that’s an extra $80 for that.

Now, not all of us have $700 USD to drop on a console, especially when we’re already hearing from Sony that the PlayStation 6 chips are being contracted to AMD, meaning we could definitely  have a PS6 within 5 years. But I think it’s fair to really paraphrase fictional doctor Ian Malcom and ask ourselves: even if you could buy a PS5 Pro, does that mean that you should?

Let’s look at a few things you could buy with the $700 that the new PlayStation 5 Pro will cost

• The complete physical and digital bundle for the 2024 rules for Dungeons and Dragons for three people — and then you’d only have to throw in another $20 to get a fourth person the bundle as well. You could completely outfit a four person group with the entire core rulebook series for the same cost.
• A solid starter two-handed sword if you want to get into HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) will run you between $400 to $600. Here’s one you could get for $499 CAD, which is just over $360 USD. You could basically buy two great big swords for the price of one PS5 Pro. You don’t need to play Baldur’s Gate 3 if you can just go stab things yourself.
• You could also buy two Roombas, or one Roomba and one greatsword, and make yourself a sword wielding vacuum cleaner robot. I don’t think it’s a great idea to put a sword on one, but you could do it for less than a PlayStation5 Pro.
• Do you like sour candy? No? Well, then you probably wouldn’t want to spend $700 USD on 28 of these big jars of Cry Baby Extra Sour Bubble Gum. But you could do so. I certainly can’t stop you.
• If you like Spirithoods products, you could buy this coat for around $600 USD, meaning you’d still have enough money for 4 of those sour candy bubble gum jars if you wanted. Sadly, this coat would cost you nearly 2 PS5 Pros, making dressing up in sequins and fake fur far more expensive than I can even imagine.
• 35 pizzas, assuming those pizzas were $20.
• I found some hedgehogs on Kijiji for $200 CAD, which is less than $150 USD at the time of this writing. So you could have 4 baby hedgehogs and a little under $100 USD left over to buy them whatever it is that hedgehogs eat.
• Five pairs of these really expensive (I think? Honestly I don’t really know if this is a lot for this particular purchase) clown shoes.
• Three Allosaur statues for your front lawn.
• You could get two partridges in their own pear trees for a little under $700 USD. Sadly, inflation has pushed up two turtle doves to over $750 USD, meaning that you should probably just get the partridges.

While I make no attempt to claim this as an exhaustive list of things you could buy for the purchase price of a PS5 Pro, it should help you to get a sense of what you’d be looking to spend.