Yeah, It was actually inspired by many controllers. See the quote in my reply to Josph above to see how it was conceived.

That fat was certainly unique but it felt comically large in my hands so I still prefer the S controller.

I didn't say it was only for Japan. I said it was "used to appeal to Japan", i.e., it was purposefully designed for the Japanese market (and later made its way elsewhere as soon as they were able to manufacture more of it). Having a Japanese codename should provide a hint. There is a interesting article on this…

I want to see the banana inside this....

That's the S 'Akebono' controller used to appeal to Japan and not the original fat 'Duke' one.

I don't think they ever change console specifications to the better (other than shrinking the manufacturing process and optimizing chip design which make it cheaper to produce). After all, the PS3 still uses SATA I interface after all these years. Sony could have added USB3 ports in newer PS3 models as an incentive to…

You might have a point about product differentiation in motherboards.

Still, it's not necessarily expensive but it might be comparatively expensive. Even a few cents saved go a long way when we talk about millions of units in production. This is all speculative, of course. Without hard data, we cannot claim this or…

High-end GPUs like the 290x and 780Ti provides good enough performance with most games. You can get around 30fps with many games on a single card (not necessarily at the maximum settings but not much lower from it). Crysis 3 and BF4 are quite demanding, however. Having a CFX/SLI setup will boost your frames. It's…

That said, the particular SSD model they tested (Samsung EVO 256GB) has worse 4K Read/Write IOPS than the 500GB+ models. They also mostly tested disc-based games which they say are bottlenecked by the BD drive. Only one digital game was tested. If you go all digital, you will see more benefits but they are not that…

IGN has done a Speed Test Comparison

I think they are more interested in cutting down costs at the moment. If they can get away with a SATA II interface, there is no real reason for them not to; financially speaking.

Is it really? Mobo manufacturers still use some SATA II ports in addition to the SATA III ones in their cheaper motherboards. Only the top models get all SATA III connections.

It's likely SATA II. A commenter on Engadget said they installed an SSD but data transfer was limited to 260-280MBps.

I hope 3rd party manufacturers start selling alternative top panels (the one you have to remove in order to change the HDD). I could use a matte one :)

Well, the 30th anniversary is coming soon in 2017 so they need some sort of Ultra Super Special Edition to Celebrate!

Hence the wink ;)

That could be a Vita game ;)

Thinking about them as 2 different episodes would make more sense.

So... is this running on PS3 or PS4?