PS5 vs PS4 in 2026: 15x Faster SSD, $650 vs $199

Here is the strangest sentence this desk gets to write in 2026: the newer console costs more than it did at launch, and the older one is the bargain of the decade. On April 2, 2026, Sony pushed the disc-drive PlayStation 5 to $649.99 in the United States — $150 above the $499.99 it debuted at in November 2020. A refurbished PlayStation 4 Pro, the machine the PS5 was built to bury, changes hands for roughly $199. So the “upgrade” now carries a $450 premium, and that premium is pointing the wrong way on the calendar.

Normally a console comparison at this stage of a generation is a formality. Six years in, the last-gen box is a discount curiosity and the current-gen box has fallen in price. That is not what happened here. The PS4 is a legacy platform on a fixed sunset schedule, still selling into a supported-until-2027 library. The PS5 is the active standard whose price went up twice — once in August 2025, once in April 2026 — because the memory chips inside it got caught in an AI-hardware supply squeeze and a tariff. The result is a comparison where the technical winner is never in doubt and the value question is unusually sharp.

This is a next-gen-versus-last-gen matchup dressed as a buying guide. We will do the specs honestly, correct the two or three numbers that everyone gets wrong, price both machines at mid-2026 reality rather than launch nostalgia, and then tell you which one to actually buy. The short version lives at the bottom. The reasons live in between.

The 2026 Setup

Before the tables, understand the board. The two consoles are not competing for the same buyer anymore, and pretending they are is how you end up recommending the wrong one.

Why this comparison is upside-down in 2026

In a normal generation, you compare a $399 current console against a $199 clearance predecessor and the math writes itself. In 2026 the PS5 sits at $599.99 (Digital) to $649.99 (Disc), and the used PS4 Pro floats around $199–$249 because Sony stopped manufacturing new PS4 hardware years ago — every PS4 Pro on a shelf today is refurbished, open-box, or secondhand. That inverts the usual value logic. The old machine is cheap because supply is fixed and demand is bleeding out; the new machine is expensive because its bill of materials got hit by the same DRAM shortage driving up the cost of every graphics card and server in the world.

So this is not “good console versus better console at a small premium.” It is “a mature, supported, dirt-cheap library machine” against “a genuinely generational leap that now costs more than a mid-range gaming PC's worth of goodwill.” Both statements are true at once, which is exactly why people argue about it.

What actually changed — and what didn't

Almost nothing changed on the hardware itself in 2025–2026, and that is the honest headline. No new PS4 model exists. The PS5 got its Slim redesign back in late 2023 and the PS5 Pro in November 2024; the base PS5's silicon is the same 10.28-teraflop RDNA 2 part it shipped with in 2020. What changed in 2025–2026 was price and support status, not capability. The PS4's system software has received no meaningful feature updates since 2022. The PS5 receives routine maintenance firmware — the current stability line runs in the 26.xx range as of mid-2026 — but nothing that alters the comparison.

That stability is a gift to a comparison writer: the numbers below are stable, verifiable, and not going to move next month. The only volatile figure in this entire article is the price, and Sony has spent the last year moving it in one direction.

The one-sentence verdict, up top

If you have money and no PS4, buy the PS5 — the SSD alone rewrites how games load and feel, and you are buying into the platform that still gets the games. If you have a PS4 and a library and you are broke, the machine you own is supported into 2027 and there is no shame in waiting. Everything past this point is the receipts.

Specs, Head to Head

The spec sheet is where the “generational leap” cliché earns its keep. This is not a spec bump. It is a different class of machine, and the raw numbers understate it because the biggest change — storage architecture — doesn't fit neatly in a teraflop.

The full table

Three machines, because the PS4 Pro is the fairest fight the PS4 family can put up. Base PS4 for the floor, PS4 Pro for the ceiling, PS5 for the target.

Seventeen rows, and only two of them favor the PS4: it is cheaper to buy used, and — a genuine footnote of retro trivia — neither PS4 ever shipped a 4K UHD Blu-ray drive, a gap the PS5 Disc model finally closes. Everything else is a rout.

Reading the teraflop math (and the trap)

Here is where marketing and misremembering collide. You will see the claim that the current PlayStation is “nearly nine times” the PS4 Pro. It isn't. The base PS5's 10.28 teraflops against the PS4 Pro's 4.2 is a 2.45x gap; against the base PS4's 1.84 it is 5.59x. The “nine times” figure only materializes if you put the PS5 Pro's 16.7 teraflops against the base PS4's 1.84 (9.08x) — a comparison that quietly swaps two machines to inflate the number. Best Buy's own explainer pins the honest base-console gap at 10.3 versus 1.84 teraflops, which is the figure to quote.

COMPUTE DELTA (raw TFLOPS)
  PS5 10.28   / PS4 base 1.84  = 5.59x
  PS5 10.28   / PS4 Pro  4.20  = 2.45x
  PS5 Pro 16.7 / PS4 base 1.84 = 9.08x   <- the "9x" only lives here

MEMORY
  PS5  16 GB GDDR6 @ 448 GB/s
  PS4   8 GB GDDR5 @ 176 GB/s   -> 2x capacity, 2.5x bandwidth

STORAGE THROUGHPUT (raw)
  PS5 SSD  5.50 GB/s
  PS4 HDD  ~0.05-0.10 GB/s      -> ~55-110x raw bandwidth

If you are the sort of buyer weighing the halo tier instead, the delta that matters is a different one — we broke down the PS5 Pro's 45% raster uplift and $300 premium over the base PS5 separately, and the short answer is that it is a niche buy for detail-obsessed owners, not a first console.

RAM, CPU, and the parts nobody quotes

Teraflops get the headline; the CPU and memory subsystem do the actual work of making a 2020s game run. The PS4's octa-core Jaguar was a tablet-class chip in 2013 — low-power, low-clock, and by the end of the generation it was the bottleneck strangling frame rates in ambitious open-world games. The PS5's Zen 2 cores at up to 3.5 GHz are not just faster per clock; they are a different lineage entirely, and they are why the PS5 can hold 60 fps in games the PS4 could only dream about at 30. Double the RAM (16 GB vs 8 GB) and 2.5x the memory bandwidth (448 vs 176 GB/s) mean the PS5 can hold more of the world resident and feed the GPU without choking. These are the unglamorous numbers that decide whether a game stutters, and every one of them lands on the PS5's side.

The SSD Is the Argument

If you remember one thing from this comparison, make it this: the single most consequential difference between a PS4 and a PS5 is not the graphics. It is the storage. Sony's chief architect built the entire pitch for the machine around it, and five years of use have proven him right.

5.5 GB/s versus a spinning disk

The PS4 shipped with a 5,400 RPM mechanical laptop hard drive moving roughly 50 to 100 megabytes per second. The PS5 ships with a custom NVMe solid-state drive rated at 5.5 gigabytes per second raw, with typical compressed throughput higher still. That is not an incremental improvement; on raw bandwidth it is somewhere between 55x and 110x, depending on which PS4 drive you benchmark against. The gap is so large it stops being a spec and becomes a design constraint that simply disappears. Games no longer have to hide loading behind slow elevator rides, crawl-through-gap animations, or literal loading screens, because the data is already there.

Cerny's “freedom” pitch, five years later

In the Road to PS5 technical presentation on March 18, 2020, PS5 architect Mark Cerny made the SSD the centerpiece. “You can load 2GB of content in a quarter of a second,” he said — a figure that maps directly to the 5.5 GB/s rating. But the line that aged best was the design argument: “The primary reason for an ultra-high-speed SSD is that it gives the game designer freedom.” Freedom from the streaming budget that dictated how fast a world could scroll past you. Freedom to teleport a player across a map without a mask. It sounded like architecture-conference abstraction in 2020. By 2026 it is just how PS5 games are built, and going back to a PS4 to feel the difference is genuinely startling.

What it actually feels like

The demo everyone cites is the fast-travel test. In Sony's own footage, a Marvel's Spider-Man fast-travel that took the PS4 Pro around 15 seconds resolved on PS5 in roughly 0.8 seconds — the collapse Sony rounded to “15x.” VGC separately clocked Spider-Man: Miles Morales booting in about two seconds from a cold start. Multiply that across every menu, every death-and-retry, every fast-travel of a hundred-hour game, and you recover hours of your life you didn't know a hard drive was stealing. This is the difference you feel in the first ten minutes and never stop feeling. It is, bluntly, the whole argument for spending the money.

Pricing in 2026

Now the part that makes this comparison genuinely awkward: the pricing is not where the internet thinks it is, because the internet is quoting 2020 or 2024 MSRPs. Here is mid-2026 reality.

The April 2026 hike, line by line

On March 27, 2026, Sony's VP of Global Marketing Isabelle Tomatis announced a global price increase effective April 2: “With continued pressures in the global economic landscape, we've made the decision to increase the prices of PS5, PS5 Pro, and PlayStation Portal remote player globally.” That corporate euphemism has two concrete causes. The first is an AI-driven DRAM shortage — memory spot prices ran up roughly 60% year over year as datacenters hoovered up supply — and the PS5's 16 GB of GDDR6 sits squarely in the blast radius. The second is a 25% U.S. semiconductor tariff. This was the second hike in eight months; the console had already ticked up in August 2025.

The generational drift, laid bare, is the most damning table in this piece. Consoles are supposed to get cheaper. This one did the opposite:

Pricing and availability table

Against those risen prices, the PS4 family looks like a fire sale — because it is one. No new units are made; the market is pure secondhand and refurbished stock, which is what pushes a once-$399 PS4 Pro down to $199.

The used-PS4 math

Here is the value calculation stated plainly. The cheapest way onto the PlayStation ecosystem in 2026 is a used PS4 Pro at roughly $199, which plays the same 4,000+ game library you would buy a PS5 to access — minus the current-gen exclusives. The cheapest new PS5 is the Digital Edition at $599.99, exactly $400 more, and it locks you into digital-only purchasing with no disc resale. The disc PS5 at $649.99 is $450 above the used Pro. Whether that gap is worth it is the entire rest of this article, but understand the shape of it: you are not paying a modest upgrade tax. You are paying roughly triple, in a year when the premium option got more expensive and the budget option got cheaper.

Graphics and Frame Rates

Storage is the argument, but graphics is the argument people see. Here the gap is wide, occasionally overstated, and worth pinning down precisely.

Ray tracing: present versus absent

The PS5's RDNA 2 GPU includes hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The PS4's GCN GPU has none — not a weaker version, none. This is a binary, not a slider. Reflections that actually reflect the scene, global illumination that responds to a moving light source, shadows with correct penumbra: on PS4 these are faked with cube maps and baked lighting or skipped entirely; on PS5 they can be computed. In practice ray tracing on the base PS5 is used selectively — it is not an infinitely powerful part — but the capability defines the visual generation gap. When a 2025 game ships a ray-traced mode, the PS4 simply cannot render that image.

120 fps, VRR, and 4K reality

The PS4 tops out at 1080p and, in the vast majority of its library, 30 fps — 60 was the exception, not the rule. The PS4 Pro pushed toward 4K but did it with checkerboard rendering, an upscaling trick that reconstructs a 4K-ish image from roughly half the pixels. The PS5 outputs native 4K, supports up to 120 fps over HDMI 2.1, and adds Variable Refresh Rate to smooth out the frames it can't perfectly pace. Whether you hit 120 depends entirely on the game — most AAA titles offer a 60 fps “performance” mode and reserve 120 for lighter or competitive games — but the ceiling exists, and on PS4 it does not. If a steady 60 is your baseline expectation, the PS4 will disappoint you constantly and the PS5 rarely will.

Upscaling and the checkerboard compromise

The PS4 Pro's checkerboard 4K was clever for 2016 and looks soft in 2026. The base PS5 leans on more modern reconstruction and, in its Pro sibling, on machine-learning upscaling entirely absent from the PS4 lineage. If you want to see how far that road has run, we covered how PSSR 2 upgraded 50+ PS5 Pro games for free in 2026 — the important point for this comparison is that the base PS5 already outclasses the Pro's best checkerboard trickery, and the PS4 was never in this conversation. Image reconstruction is one more axis where the two machines are separated by an architectural generation, not a settings toggle.

The DualSense Question

Specs win arguments; controllers win afternoons. The DualSense is the most underrated reason the PS5 feels like a new generation, and it comes with one genuinely annoying restriction that trips up upgraders.

Haptics and adaptive triggers

The DualShock 4 rumbled. The DualSense does something categorically different. Its dual voice-coil actuators produce localized, high-fidelity haptics — you can feel the texture of a surface change under a character's feet, distinguish rain from gravel — where the DualShock offered one broad buzz. The adaptive triggers add variable resistance: a bowstring that tightens, a clogged trigger that gives way with a snap, a car's throttle that fights back. These are not gimmicks that wear off in an hour; they are a genuinely new input channel, and games that use them well (which is most first-party output) are diminished on any other controller. There is no retrofit path — the DualShock 4 cannot reproduce any of it.

The controller-compatibility catch

Here is the trap for anyone bringing a PS4 into a PS5 household. A DualShock 4 does work on the PS5 — but only when you are playing a PS4 game through backward compatibility. For any PS5-native title, Sony's firmware refuses the old pad entirely; you must use a DualSense. The stated reason is that PS5 games are designed around haptics and adaptive triggers the DualShock physically lacks, so Sony blocks it rather than ship a degraded experience. The practical effect is that your shelf of PS4 controllers becomes second-player pads for old games and nothing more, and every DualSense you need is another $70-ish on top of the console.

Astro's Playroom as the demo

Sony understood it had a controller nobody would understand from a spec sheet, so it pre-installed the demo on every PS5. Astro's Playroom — free, built in, and specifically designed to show off every haptic and trigger trick — became the de facto proof of concept, widely cited as one of the best haptic showcases ever shipped. It is the fastest way to understand why the DualSense matters: play it for twenty minutes on a PS5, then pick up a DualShock 4, and the older pad feels like a relic. That contrast, more than any teraflop, is what “next generation” means in the hand.

Backward Compatibility

The PS5's single most important consumer feature after the SSD is that it eats the PS4's entire library — which is also the feature that makes the PS4 slightly harder to justify buying new. It runs in one direction only, and the boundary is worth understanding precisely.

What Game Boost actually does

Per PlayStation's official support page, “the overwhelming majority” of the 4,000+ PS4 games are playable on PS5, with third-party testing putting disc compatibility above 99%. But it is not merely emulation-grade tolerance — it is often an upgrade. Game Boost lets many PS4 titles run with higher or steadier frame rates on PS5 hardware with no patch required. Games that were locked to 30 fps and dipped below it on a PS4 can hold their cap — or, when the developer unlocked the frame rate, climb past it toward 60. The load times, naturally, collapse onto the SSD. Buying a PS5 does not orphan your PS4 collection; it frequently makes it play better than it ever did on the machine it was made for.

What the PS5 will NOT play

The wall is sharp and it is worth stating because people assume “backward compatible” means “everything.” It does not. The PS5 reads PS4 discs and runs PS4 digital titles. It does not read PS3, PS2, or PS1 discs. There is no hardware or disc-based path to your older physical library; the only route to those older generations is streaming or repurchasing digital classics where Sony offers them. If your nostalgia lives on PS2 discs in a shoebox, neither of these consoles is your answer — that is a job for other hardware entirely, and a different article.

The library math

Fold it together and the asymmetry is stark. A PS5 gives you: every PS4 game you own, usually improved, plus the entire PS5-native catalogue you cannot play any other way. A PS4 gives you: the PS4 library only, at its original performance, with the current-gen exclusives permanently out of reach. The 4,000+ number is a point for the PS5 as much as it is a point for the PS4 — because the PS5 inherits it wholesale and then adds to it. The only thing the PS4 offers that the PS5 doesn't is a lower entry price, and we have already seen how large that gap has grown.

The PS4 in 2026

To buy a PS4 in 2026 is to buy onto a platform with a visible expiration date. That is not automatically a dealbreaker — plenty of great machines are worth owning after their prime — but you should know exactly what you are buying into.

The sunset schedule has started

The wind-down is no longer theoretical. As PlayStation LifeStyle reported, the Tournaments menus and Teams functionality stopped being accessible on PS4 as of October 27, 2025 — while continuing to work on PS5. That is the pattern to watch: features don't vanish for everyone, they vanish for the PS4 first while the PS5 carries on. Sony recommends recreating any Teams-based groups through the Messages feature. It is a small loss on its own, but it is the leading edge of a broader service retreat scheduled to accelerate through 2026 and 2027.

New games until 2027 — then the tail

The counterweight is that the software isn't dead yet. Push Square confirmed the PS4 will still receive new games in 2027, with EA Sports FC continuing to ship on the platform and lower-technical-demand titles — indies, AA releases, remakes, rereleases — keeping the release calendar warm. The big annualized franchises are the ones peeling off first: the marquee Call of Duty and the heaviest AAA productions are moving to PS5-only. So the PS4 in 2026–2027 is not a machine with no new games; it is a machine whose new games are increasingly the modest ones, while the showcases require the newer box.

The 14-year record

There is a genuine piece of hardware history buried in this sunset. A 2013 launch and a supported-until-2027 tail gives the PS4 a roughly 14-year active lifecycle — long enough to surpass the PlayStation 2's 13 years, the previous PlayStation longevity record. That is remarkable for a machine whose successor has been on sale since 2020, and it is a direct consequence of the PS4's enormous 117-million-plus installed base being too large to abandon. If you want the fuller story of how that base was built — and how thoroughly Sony won that generation — we told it in our PS4 vs Xbox One retrospective, 117M to 58M. The PS4 is not being kept alive out of sentiment. It is being kept alive because too many people own one.

The Sales Scoreboard

Here is the fact that surprises people who assume the newer console must be winning: it isn't, at least not yet, and the reason is instructive.

117 million versus 92 million

According to VGChartz's May 2026 sales comparison, the PS4 has sold 117.20 million units lifetime, while the PS5 sits at 92.34 million at 67 months on the market — a gap of 24.86 million still to close. In the United States specifically the split is 34.93M (PS4) to 29.66M (PS5), a 5.37M gap; in Japan the PS5 trails the PS4's lifetime figure by 2.10M. The PS5 is a phenomenally successful console selling into headwinds, and it will very likely pass the PS4's lifetime number eventually. But as of mid-2026, on the raw scoreboard, the last-gen machine is still ahead.

Why the PS5 is behind its predecessor's pace

The more revealing metric is launch-aligned pace: line both consoles up at the same number of months from launch and the PS5 has, for stretches of this generation, tracked slightly behind where the PS4 was at the equivalent point. The causes are not mysterious. The PS5 spent its first two years supply-constrained by chip shortages when it should have been ramping; then, just as availability normalized, Sony raised the price twice. A console that costs $599.99–$649.99 in 2026 — up from a PS4 that launched at $399.99 — is fighting a different affordability battle than its predecessor ever did. Great hardware, priced into a slower climb.

The installed-base argument

For a buyer, the sales gap cuts a specific way. That 117-million PS4 base is exactly why the platform keeps getting games into 2027 — publishers chase installed hardware, and there is an enormous amount of PS4 hardware in living rooms. It is also why the used market is deep and cheap: a lot of those consoles are being traded up. So the sales numbers that look like a PS4 “win” are the same numbers that make a used PS4 a defensible budget buy and make the PS5's eventual victory a matter of when, not if. The scoreboard and the buying advice are telling the same story from two ends.

Five Buyers, Five Answers

“Which is better” is the wrong question; the machines aren't aimed at the same person. Here are five real buyers and the honest answer for each.

1. The first-console / budget buyer

You have never owned a PlayStation, or you are buying for a kid, and $650 is not a number you want to hear. Buy a used PS4 Pro (~$199) or a PS4 Slim (~$149). You get 4,000+ games, most of the defining hits of the 2010s at deep discount, and a platform supported into 2027. You will miss current-gen exclusives and the SSD, but as a way to spend $199 on years of gaming, nothing else in the room competes. Just go in knowing the clock is running.

2. The upgrader with a PS4 library

You own a PS4, a shelf of discs, and years of saves. Upgrade to the PS5 Disc ($649.99) and keep the PS4 as a second-room box. The Disc model reads your existing games, Game Boost frequently improves them, and the SSD makes your entire backlog feel new. Buy the Disc, not the Digital, precisely because it protects your physical library and gives you resale value. Your PS4 doesn't get retired — it migrates to the bedroom.

3. The 60/120 fps competitive player

You play shooters and fighting games and you care about frame rate more than fidelity. PS5, no debate. The PS4 tops out at 60 fps and mostly delivers 30; the PS5 offers 60 as a baseline performance mode and 120 in lighter competitive titles, with VRR to smooth the rest. In a genre where frames are reaction time, this is not a preference — it is equipment. The DualSense's precision is a bonus you'll stop noticing only because you'll never want to give it up.

4. The single-player showcase chaser

You are here for the big cinematic exclusives — the ones that get the awards and the wallpapers. PS5. The current generation of showcase titles is being built PS5-first or PS5-only, engineered around the SSD's streaming and the DualSense's feedback in ways the PS4 physically cannot reproduce. Buying a PS4 for these games means either playing cut-down last-gen versions or not playing them at all. This is the buyer the PS5 was designed for, and the machine repays the money most visibly here.

5. The couch-streaming / remote-play household

You share one TV, or you want to play in bed, and streaming the console to a handheld or phone matters to you. PS5, and it isn't close. The PS5's Remote Play is materially better — higher resolution ceilings and the newer feature set — and it pairs with the PlayStation Portal. We walked through getting the most out of it in our guide to PS Remote Play at 1080p High Quality in 12 steps. The PS4 supports Remote Play too, but at a lower ceiling and without the ecosystem around it. For a streaming-first household, the newer machine is the whole point.

Migrating PS4 to PS5

If you have decided to upgrade, the good news is Sony made this easy — much easier than console transfers used to be. Here is the sequence that actually works, with the gotchas flagged.

Moving your data

You have three routes, in descending order of speed. The fastest is a wired LAN transfer: connect both consoles to the same network — ideally by Ethernet cable directly or through the same router — and the PS5's Data Transfer tool copies games, saves, and settings across in one pass. Wi-Fi works but is slower and flakier for large libraries. The third route is a USB extended-storage drive: move PS4 games onto a USB drive from the PS4, then plug it into the PS5. Note that PS4 games run fine from USB storage on the PS5, but any PS5-native games must live on internal or M.2 storage.

1. On the PS5: Settings → System → System Software → Data Transfer.
2. Sign into the same PlayStation Network account on both consoles first — the transfer keys off it.
3. Choose LAN (fastest), select which games and saves to bring, and start it. A large library can take a while; leave both machines on.
4. Re-download anything you skipped from your library rather than transferring it — often faster than moving it.

Saves, PS Plus, and licenses

Your saves come with you. If you are a PlayStation Plus subscriber, cloud saves are the cleaner path — upload from the PS4, download on the PS5, done, no cable required. Digital game licenses are tied to your account, so anything you bought digitally re-downloads on the PS5 at no cost; you are not repurchasing. Set your PS5 as your primary console under account settings so licenses resolve correctly. One caution: some PS4 games have separate free PS5 “upgrade” versions rather than running the PS4 build — check per game, because occasionally you want the native PS5 version instead of the transferred one.

Discs, digital, and what breaks

If you bought the Disc PS5, your PS4 discs work directly — insert, install, play, often with Game Boost. If you bought the Digital PS5, your PS4 discs are now worthless to you; there is no disc drive, and Sony does not offer disc-to-digital conversion. This is the single most important thing to get right before you buy: a disc owner who buys the Digital edition has stranded their entire physical library. The other thing that “breaks” is controllers — as covered above, your DualShock 4 pads work only for PS4 games on the PS5, so budget for at least one DualSense. Everything else is smoother than any previous PlayStation transition.

The Verdict

Two machines, one obvious technical winner, one genuinely contested value question. Here is where the data lands.

Pros and cons, per option

Who should stay on PS4

Buy or keep a PS4 if the entry price is the deciding constraint and the library you want already exists on it. A used PS4 Pro at $199 is a legitimately good purchase for a first console, a kid's machine, a second room, or a budget backlog-clearer — the 2010s library is deep, cheap, and supported for another year-plus. You are buying a mature platform at the bottom of its price curve, and there is no shame in it. Just do it with clear eyes: the services are retreating, the showcases have moved on, and this is the last stretch of the machine's life.

The data-backed recommendation

For everyone who can afford it, the PS5 is the buy, and the SSD is why — not the teraflops, not the ray tracing, but the storage architecture that Cerny promised would give designers “freedom” and, five years on, demonstrably did. It is the difference you feel in the first ten minutes and every session after. The 2026 price hikes are real and irritating — a console should not cost $150 more than it did at launch — but they do not change the underlying verdict; they only sharpen the timing question. If you own a PS4 and a library and money is tight, wait, because your machine is supported into 2027 and the PS5's price is more likely to rise again than to fall. If you don't, or if a game you want is PS5-only, buy the Disc edition to protect physical ownership, keep the old box for the second room, and don't look back. The decision tree, compressed:

BUYING DECISION (mid-2026)
------------------------------------------------
Do you already own a PS4 + a library you like?
  |
  +-- No  -> Buy PS5.
  |          Digital $599.99 if you are all-digital
  |          Disc    $649.99 if you want discs / 4K
  |                          Blu-ray / resale value
  |
  +-- Yes -> Do you want 60-120fps, ray tracing,
             or PS5-only exclusives?
               |
               +-- Yes -> Upgrade to PS5 Disc;
               |          keep PS4 as a 2nd-room box
               |
               +-- No  -> Stay on PS4 until a game
                          you want is PS5-only
                          (price won't drop soon)

Chasing one specific thing?
  Cheapest way to play 4,000 games .. used PS4 Pro (~$199)
  4K / 120fps / DualSense feel ...... PS5 ($599.99+)
  PSSR-tier fidelity ................ PS5 Pro ($899.99),
                                      NOT the base PS5
------------------------------------------------

The PS4 won its own generation and earned the longest life in PlayStation history. The PS5 is the better machine by every technical measure that matters, priced higher than it should be by forces that have nothing to do with the console itself. Pay the premium if you can; wait it out if you can't. Either way, the PS4 has one more good year in it — and then the SSD wins, the way it was always going to.