Retroid Pocket 5 vs 6 (2026): $30 for 70% More CPU

There is a specific kind of buyer's remorse that exists only in the Android handheld market, and Retroid has spent the better part of a decade perfecting the machinery that manufactures it. You buy the current model. It is excellent. Eighteen months later — often less — the company ships a successor that is meaningfully better for roughly the price of a large pizza, and the thing in your hands becomes, overnight, the budget option. This is not a defect in the process. This is the process.

In 2026 the two devices at the center of that machine are the Retroid Pocket 5, released in September 2024 at $199, and the Retroid Pocket 6, which went to retail in early 2026 at $229. Thirty dollars separates their launch stickers. What that thirty dollars buys is not a rounding-error spec bump. It is a roughly 69% jump in single-core CPU, a 120Hz AMOLED panel where the 5 runs 60Hz, a battery a fifth larger with fast charging the 5 does not have, 4K60 video output, and a Wi-Fi radio a full generation newer. The Pocket 6 is not a little better than the Pocket 5. It is a different class of machine wearing a nearly identical shell.

This review is a long look at that thirty-dollar chasm — what falls into it, what survives it, and why the Pocket 5, a device barely eighteen months old and genuinely good, has been quietly relegated to the sale rack by its own successor.

The $30 Question

The Setup

Both machines are 5.5-inch Android emulation handhelds in the horizontal, controller-forward form factor that Retroid has iterated on since the Pocket 2. Both run a full Android install, both take a microSD card up to 2TB, both carry twin Hall-effect analog sticks and analog L2/R2 triggers, and both are aimed squarely at the person who wants to carry a library spanning the NES to the PlayStation 2 in one hand. Neither ships with a single game on it. That distinction matters, and we will return to it when the law comes up.

The Pocket 5 was, at launch, the value benchmark of its generation: a 1080p OLED and a former flagship phone chip for two hundred dollars. It did not need excuses. The problem is that Retroid then built the Pocket 6, and the 6 does the same job with more of everything that counts.

The Delta: Thirty Dollars, Seventy Percent

Reduce the comparison to a single line and it reads like a misprint. Geekbench 6 single-core: 1,985 on the Pocket 6 versus 1,176 on the Pocket 5 — a 69% gain, near enough to "seventy percent more CPU" to round there and be honest about it. The price to unlock that gain, at MSRP, is $30. You will not find a cleaner price-to-performance argument anywhere in consumer electronics this year.

Note what that number is not. It is not "nearly double," the phrase that floats around in the marketing-adjacent coverage. Doubling would put the 6 at roughly 2,350. It lands at 1,985. Seventy percent is an enormous generational leap; it does not need to be inflated to a hundred, and inflating it only teaches you to distrust the source.

The Thesis: A Value Crisis for the 5

The Pocket 6 does not merely beat the Pocket 5. It strands it. HandheldRank's Phil Retro, writing on whether the older device still makes sense, landed on the exact word: the Pocket 5 is now a sale-only device... outpaced by its own shadow. His sharper line is the one worth pinning to the wall — the problem isn't the device; it's the neighborhood it lives in. In a vacuum, he notes, the Pocket 5 is still a fantastic gaming machine. It just no longer gets to live in a vacuum. It lives thirty dollars below a strictly superior successor, and that is a bad address.

The Machine's position, stated up front so the rest of this is honest: at MSRP, there is no version of the Pocket 5 recommendation that survives contact with the Pocket 6. The 5 becomes interesting again only when its price falls — and it does fall, frequently, to $150-175 — at which point it stops competing with the 6 and starts competing with itself.

The Spec Sheet

Reading the Table

Here is the full accounting, corrected against vendor listings and 2026 reviews rather than the tidy marketing summary. Two rows deserve a flag before you read them: the Pocket 5's display is a 1080p OLED, not the lesser LCD some comparisons imply, and the Pocket 5 does output video over USB-C. The gaps between these machines are real; they do not need to be exaggerated by pretending the 5 is worse than it is.

Where the Pocket 5 Still Holds Ground

The table is a landslide, but it is not a shutout, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The Pocket 5 is 40 grams lighter — 280g against 320g — which over a two-hour session is a real difference for smaller hands, not a spec-sheet curiosity. It keeps the same 1080p OLED, so the picture quality at 60Hz is genuinely excellent; nobody has ever picked up a Pocket 5 and complained the screen was ugly.

And, quietly, the Pocket 5 is the more open device. It has an active community running Linux builds alongside Android, which matters if you are the kind of person who wants to flash a Batocera or Linux image and live outside Google's walled garden. The Pocket 6 ships Android 13 and, at time of writing, stays there. For a developer or a tinkerer, the 5's flexibility is a genuine, if narrow, advantage.

Where the Pocket 6 Pulls Away

Everywhere else. The silicon, the RAM generation, the refresh rate, the battery, the charging speed, the radios, the video ceiling — every one of those rows favors the 6, and several favor it by a full generation. The single most consequential is the SoC, because it is the one that changes which games are playable rather than merely prettier. We take that up next.

Silicon: 865 vs 8 Gen 2

The Benchmarks, Honestly

The Pocket 5 runs the Snapdragon 865, Qualcomm's 2020 flagship built on a 7nm process. The Pocket 6 runs the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the 2022 flagship on 4nm. Two years and a process node separate them, and the gap shows exactly where you would expect.

Geekbench 6 single-core is the number that matters most for emulation, because most emulators are punishingly single-thread-bound — the recompiler for a given console runs hot on one core and the rest of the chip mostly idles. There the 6 posts 1,985 to the 5's 1,176, a 69% advantage. Vendor-cited AnTuTu figures — treat synthetic aggregate scores with the skepticism they have earned — put the 6 near 1.2 million against the 5's ~668,000, which works out to roughly 1.8x, not the "~50% increase" that gets quoted in the thinner write-ups. However you slice it, the honest headline is the Geekbench one: about seventy percent more usable CPU.

Adreno 740 and the GPU Gap

The graphics story is even more lopsided. The Pocket 5's Adreno 650 was a fine GPU in 2020; the Pocket 6's Adreno 740, clocked near 680 MHz, is roughly twice as capable. For the emulators that lean on the GPU — Dreamcast, PSP, GameCube upscaling, PlayStation 2 at multiplied internal resolutions — that is the difference between "runs" and "runs at 3x native resolution without the frame timing falling apart."

There is a subtlety that the raw GPU number hides, and it is the one that decides the hardest cases. The 8 Gen 2 has, by 2026, years of driver maturity behind it — including the community Turnip Vulkan drivers that the emulation scene depends on for the demanding cores. HandheldRank, comparing the 6 to Retroid's own G2, put the driver point bluntly: the 8 Gen 2 has years of driver optimization, while newer GPUs lack that maturity. Silicon that is two years old in phone terms is, in emulation terms, seasoned. That is not a paradox; it is how this hobby works.

LPDDR5x: The Quiet Upgrade

The memory jump — 8GB LPDDR4x on the 5 to 8GB or 12GB LPDDR5x on the 6 — reads like the least interesting row in the table and is quietly one of the most important. Faster, wider memory feeds a recompiler's texture and state traffic more smoothly, and the optional 12GB ceiling gives Android room to keep a heavy emulator and its shader cache resident instead of thrashing. If you intend to spend an afternoon in RetroArch's core list stacking shaders and run-ahead on top of a PS2 game, the memory generation is doing more of the heavy lifting than the spec sheet lets on.

The Screen: 60Hz vs 120Hz OLED

AMOLED vs the Old Glass

Let us kill a myth in the first sentence: both of these devices have OLED screens. The Pocket 5 shipped a 5.5-inch 1080p OLED, and it is lovely — deep blacks, punchy color, the works. Any comparison that frames this section as "LCD versus OLED" has the older device wrong. What actually separates the two panels is one number: refresh rate. The 5 runs 60Hz. The 6 runs 120Hz AMOLED.

RetroDodo's Brandon Saltalamacchia, who scored the Pocket 6 an 8.4/10, was unusually unqualified about the display, calling it one I simply cannot fault and noting the 5.5-inch AMOLED makes the device feel incredibly modern, with no tearing and no light bleed. When a reviewer who spent the rest of the review complaining that the device was boring cannot find a flaw in the screen, believe him.

What 120Hz Actually Buys You

Here is where a technically precise site earns its keep, because the 120Hz upgrade is real but it is not magic. Most retro content is locked to the framerate of its original hardware: a SNES game runs at 60 (or 50) fields per second and no panel refresh will invent frames that the ROM never produced. So for the 8- and 16-bit library, 120Hz mostly buys you a smoother Android UI and cleaner scrolling in menus.

Where it genuinely matters: content that can exceed 60fps. Native Android games, high-refresh emulator front-ends, PSP and Dreamcast titles unlocked past their original caps, and — critically — the reduction of display latency, because a 120Hz panel can put a frame on the glass in roughly half the time of a 60Hz one. For the person who notices input lag, that halved scan-out is the upgrade, not the marketing-friendly "smoothness." It is a meaningful improvement wearing a slightly oversold hat.

The Polygon and Ars Verdict

The mainstream tech press, arriving late to a category the handheld scene has covered for years, seized on the refresh rate as the story. Both Polygon and Ars Technica, in 2026 coverage, called the 120Hz panel the biggest upgrade in the jump from the 5 to the 6. That is defensible as a felt upgrade — the thing your eye notices first — even if the CPU is the upgrade that changes what you can actually play. Both can be true. The screen is what sells the 6 in the first thirty seconds; the silicon is what keeps it sold.

Battery, Charging, Thermals

6,000 mAh and 27 Watts

The Pocket 6 grows the battery from 5,000 mAh to 6,000 mAh — a 20% increase — and, for the first time in this line, adds 27W fast charging. The Pocket 5 has neither the capacity nor the fast-charge circuitry; it sips from a smaller tank and refills at a leisurely pace. On paper this is a clean win for the 6, and in practice it mostly is, with one honest asterisk: the 6 is also feeding a hungrier chip and a 120Hz panel, so the larger battery is partly spent keeping pace with the very upgrades that make the device better.

Real-World Runtime

Saltalamacchia's measured figures for the Pocket 6 are the ones to plan around: around 4.5 hours of mixed emulation, stretching to 6-8 hours on light 8-bit and Game Boy content, and collapsing to 2.5-3 hours when the chip is pinned running PS2 or GameCube at multiplied resolutions. The Pocket 5, with its smaller battery, lands roughly 3 hours 35 minutes under heavy emulation — respectable, and genuinely close to the 6 when both are pushed, because the 6's efficiency gains are partly eaten by its brighter, faster screen.

The practical takeaway: for a commuter grinding Game Boy Advance RPGs, both last a full day of dead time. For someone pushing sixth-generation consoles, both want a charge by mid-afternoon — but only the 6 can top itself up meaningfully over a lunch break, thanks to that 27W input.

Heat and the Fan Question

Both devices carry active cooling, which is table stakes for a chip that can pull sustained load emulating a GameCube. The 8 Gen 2's 4nm process is more efficient per clock than the 865's 7nm, so the 6 tends to hold its boost clocks longer before the fan spins up to a noticeable pitch. Neither device is silent under a PS2 workload, and neither should be — a passively cooled handheld running Dolphin at 3x native is a thermal-throttling slideshow waiting to happen. The fan is a feature. Deadpan as it sounds, you want to hear it.

Connectivity & 4K60 Output

Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3

The Pocket 6 moves to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3; the Pocket 5 sits on Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1. For a device whose network life is mostly downloading updates, syncing saves, and streaming via Moonlight, Wi-Fi 7 is future-proofing more than a daily necessity — but for game streaming from a PC, the newer radio's lower latency and headroom are a genuine, if situational, benefit. Bluetooth 5.3 similarly buys marginally better controller and headset stability. These are the kind of upgrades you never think about until the older device drops a frame mid-stream.

Video Out: 4K60 vs "It Works"

This is the row the brief got wrong, so let us set it straight. The Pocket 5 does output video over USB-C — typically 4K30, and up to 4K60 through Retroid's official dock. It is not a device that refuses to talk to a television. The Pocket 6's advantage is the ceiling: native 4K60 over DisplayPort 1.4 straight from the port, no dock required. For docked play on a 4K set — Dreamcast and PS2 upscaled onto a living-room panel — the 6 is the cleaner, higher-resolution path. The 5 gets you there; the 6 gets you there at twice the framerate.

Android 13 vs the Linux Holdout

Software is the one place the newer device looks slightly dated. The Pocket 6 ships Android 13 — the same version the two-years-older Pocket 5 launched with, and, awkwardly, an older release than the one Retroid's own discontinued G2 shipped. The Pocket 5's counterweight is community Linux support: an active scene builds Linux images for it, which is the developer's and the purist's escape hatch from Android. If your idea of a good weekend is comparing how the same PS1 game runs on stock Android versus a stripped Linux front-end, the 5 quietly offers something the 6, for now, does not.

How It Actually Plays

Benchmarks are a proxy. What you actually want to know is whether the game you care about runs, and for whom. Here is the emulation ceiling for both machines, corrected against 2026 reviews rather than optimistic forum posts. Note the bottom rows carefully — anyone telling you a $229 handheld runs the PlayStation 3 is either confused or lying.

SYSTEM           RP5 (SD865)              RP6 (SD 8 Gen 2)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
NES/SNES/GB/GBA  full speed               full speed
Genesis/TG-16    full speed               full speed
PS1 / N64        full speed               full speed
Dreamcast        full speed               full speed
PSP              full speed (2-3x)        full speed (3-4x)
Saturn           mostly full              full speed
GameCube         playable (native-ish)    full speed, up to 3x native
Wii              playable                 near-full to full
PS2              variable (native-1.5x)   most titles at 1.5x-2x native
3DS              playable (upscaled)      smooth, upscaled
Switch           a handful of titles      select titles, case-by-case
PS3 / Xbox 360   no                       no (slideshow)

That table is the whole review in twelve rows. Below the PS2 line, the two devices diverge; above it, they are close cousins. Now, five people who will read this, and how each should think about the pair.

The Casual and the Commuter

The casual player — someone who wants Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, and a stack of Game Boy Advance games on the train — is served completely by either device. Everything through the PlayStation 2 era's easier titles runs on the Pocket 5, and the 40-gram weight saving plus the frequent sub-$175 sale price arguably makes the 5 the better casual buy. For this person, the Pocket 6's headroom is capability they will never spend.

The mobile / commuter use case tilts the same way with one caveat: if the commute is long and the content is heavy, the 6's 27W charging means a fifteen-minute top-up at the office turns a dying handheld into a full evening's play. The 5 cannot do that. For light content, the 5's battery is plenty; for heavy content on the move, the 6's charging speed is the quiet decider.

The Completionist and the Co-op Couch

The completionist — the person who intends to actually finish a 90-hour GameCube RPG at 3x internal resolution — should buy the Pocket 6 and not think about it again. Saltalamacchia measured the 6 running PS2 at 1.5x and 2x native resolution and GameCube at 3x native resolution, with the honest footnote that PS2 performance is great if you don't mind tinkering between upscaling settings. That headroom is exactly what a completionist burns through over dozens of hours. The Pocket 5 will play the same libraries, but with the frame timing living closer to the edge.

The co-op / couch scenario — docking to a TV, pairing two Bluetooth controllers, playing Mario Kart: Double Dash or a Genesis brawler with someone next to you — is where the 6's 4K60 output and Bluetooth 5.3 earn their keep. The 5 can dock too, but at 4K30 and over an older radio. For two players on a big screen, the 6 is the device you leave connected to the television. This is also, incidentally, the point where the Switch 2 versus Steam Deck math starts to intrude — but that is a different class of hardware at a different price.

The Speedrunner and the 120Hz Question

The speedrunner, or anyone who feels latency in their fingertips, is the one buyer for whom the 120Hz panel is the actual reason to upgrade rather than a nicety. A 120Hz display halves scan-out time versus 60Hz, and paired with RetroArch's run-ahead — which the 8 Gen 2 has the spare cycles to run without dropping frames — the Pocket 6 can shave real, perceptible latency off input. The Pocket 5, capped at 60Hz and with less CPU overhead for run-ahead, simply cannot get as low. For frame-perfect play, this is the clearest single-purpose case for the 6.

A word on the law, because The Machine knows it. The emulators are legal; the Bleem! and Connectix fights of the early 2000s settled that. In Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp. (203 F.3d 596, 9th Cir. 2000), the court called the Virtual Game Station modestly transformative and let it stand. What ships on neither of these Retroids is a single game or a single console BIOS — those you supply, and the copyright status of your ROM library is between you and the rights holders, not Retroid. The hardware is a blank instrument. For the history of the machines you will be emulating, Hardcore Gaming 101's PlayStation 2 retrospective and the deep-cut computing archaeology at The Digital Antiquarian are both better company than any spec sheet.

The Competition

The G2: Retroid Competing With Itself

The most instructive competitor to the Pocket 5 and 6 is the device Retroid built between them and then killed. The Retroid Pocket G2, launched October 2025 at $219, took the Pocket 5's shell and dropped in Qualcomm's Snapdragon G2 Gen 2 — a gaming-oriented chip that benchmarks roughly 50% faster than the SD865 but about 10% behind the 8 Gen 2. It kept the 5's 60Hz screen. It shipped Android 15 and Bluetooth 5.4 — newer software than the Pocket 6, for whatever that is worth.

Retroid discontinued the G2 on March 16, 2026, roughly five months after launch, officially blaming the RAM-pricing crisis. Retro Handhelds' review added the quieter truth: the G2 never really seemed to fit anywhere in the lineup, wedged between the 5 and the 6 with a minimal price gap on either side. It is the purest illustration of the value crisis at the heart of this whole comparison — even Retroid could not find room for a device between these two. We took the G2 apart in full in our Pocket 6 versus G2 breakdown; the short version is that the 6 won and the G2 is gone.

The AYN Odin 2 Portal and the OLED Field

The nearest external rival is AYN's Odin 2 Portal, which at $249 base pairs the same 8 Gen 2 as the Pocket 6 with a larger 7-inch 1080p 120Hz OLED and a substantially bigger 8,000 mAh battery. For twenty dollars over the Pocket 6, you get more screen and dramatically more endurance — at the cost of a bulkier device that is less pocketable and heavier in the hand. The Odin 2 Portal is the answer to "I want the Pocket 6's guts but I care about battery and screen size more than portability." It is a legitimate cross-shop, and for the couch-first buyer it may be the better machine.

Above all of these sits the Steam Deck OLED at $549, which is a different animal entirely — x86, SteamOS, native PC gaming — and not really a competitor to a $229 Android emulation handheld so much as the next tier up. If your ambitions run to actual PC ports and modern indies rather than emulation, that is the conversation, and it is a different one.

Thor, Mangmi, and the HandheldRank Ledger

HandheldRank's 2026 rankings, per the coverage, placed the Pocket 6 above a scattering of also-rans — the likes of an AYN "Thor" and a "Mangmi Pocket Max" — as the best price-to-performance OLED handheld of the year. Treat those obscure model names with appropriate caution; the verified field that actually matters to a buyer is the one in the table above. The signal in HandheldRank's verdict is not the names it beat but the category it won: at $229, the Pocket 6 is the OLED value leader, and nothing in the current market seriously disputes that.

Pricing & Availability

The Configurations

At MSRP the ladder is simple: Pocket 5 at $199, Pocket 6 at $229 for 8GB/128GB, and $259 for the 12GB/256GB Pocket 6. The $30 base gap is the number this entire review orbits. The $259 top configuration doubles both RAM and storage for another $30 over the base 6 — a fair upsell for the completionist who wants a 256GB card slot freed up for something else, and pointless for everyone whose library fits on microSD anyway.

The 12GB Vanishing Act

The 12GB Pocket 6 has had a chaotic year, and the pricing table above tells the story in four rows. The 12GB/256GB config launched at $259 and was discontinued around March 2026, the same week Retroid raised the base 6's street price, both moves blamed on the memory-pricing spike. The 12GB variant then returned in June 2026 as a 128GB-only, stick-top-layout model at $279, per Android Authority. If you specifically want 12GB of RAM, in mid-2026 you are looking at that $279 return model, not the discontinued $259 original. This is Retroid inventory management in miniature: fast, reactive, and confusing to anyone shopping across a two-month window.

The RAM Crunch and Street Prices

The single most important pricing fact for a 2026 buyer is that these MSRPs are drifting upward, not down. The base Pocket 6 launched at $229 and, citing the same RAM-price spike that killed the G2, crept to a listed ~$249 (around $244 on goRetroid) by early March 2026. The same macro force — memory prices climbing on AI-driven demand — is pushing prices up across the whole handheld market, and it is the reason the $30 MSRP gap can widen to a $45-50 real-world gap once you account for the Pocket 5's sale pricing against the Pocket 6's inflated street price. The value math still favors the 6; it is just a slightly more expensive win than the sticker implies.

Who Should Buy What

Buy the Pocket 6 If…

The default recommendation, and the one that covers most readers:

• You are buying new at MSRP. The $30 premium over the 5 for 69% more CPU, 120Hz, and a bigger battery is the easiest money you will spend this year.
• You care about PS2, GameCube, or Wii. The 6's headroom — PS2 at 1.5-2x, GameCube at 3x native — is where the extra silicon actually changes what you play, not just how it looks.
• You feel input latency. The 120Hz panel plus run-ahead headroom is the lowest-latency configuration in this price class.
• You dock to a 4K TV. Native 4K60 over DisplayPort 1.4 is the 6's alone.

Buy the Pocket 5 If…

Narrower, but real:

• You find it on sale at $150-175. At a discount, the 5 stops competing with the 6 and becomes an outstanding value on its own terms — same OLED, most of the library.
• You want the lightest device. 280g versus 320g is a genuine ergonomic edge for smaller hands or longer sessions.
• You want Linux. The 5's community Linux support is a flexibility the 6 does not currently match.
• Your library stops at the PlayStation 1 / Dreamcast era. If you never touch sixth-generation consoles, you are paying the 6 for headroom you will never use.

Buy Neither If…

Honesty requires the off-ramp:

• You only play 8- and 16-bit games. A $50 vertical handheld will do that beautifully — a cheap Miyoo Mini Plus or RG35XX out-pockets both Retroids for a quarter of the money if your ceiling is the SNES.
• You want a bigger screen and more battery over portability. The AYN Odin 2 Portal at $249 gives you a 7-inch OLED and 8,000 mAh for twenty dollars over the base 6.
• You actually want PC gaming. Then you want a Steam Deck OLED or a Windows handheld, and no amount of Android emulation will substitute for a native x86 machine.

The Verdict & Rating

The Pocket 6: Pros and Cons

The Pocket 6 is the device to buy, and it is also — per the reviewer who scored it highest — a little boring, which is a strange and telling combination.

• Pro: ~69% more single-core CPU and roughly 2x the GPU over the Pocket 5.
• Pro: 120Hz 1080p AMOLED that RetroDodo called a panel I simply cannot fault.
• Pro: 6,000 mAh, 27W fast charging, 4K60 output, Wi-Fi 7.
• Pro: The mature 8 Gen 2 driver stack — including Turnip — that the hard emulation cases depend on.
• Con: 40g heavier than the 5, and ships Android 13 in 2026.
• Con: Street prices creeping past MSRP on the RAM crunch, and a confusing 12GB availability saga.
• Con: As Saltalamacchia put it, Retroid played it too safe to turn heads — a $250 device, he argued, should have something unique. It performs; it does not surprise.

The Pocket 5: Pros and Cons

• Pro: The same excellent 1080p OLED, now at a lower price.
• Pro: Lightest device in the comparison at 280g, with community Linux support.
• Pro: Genuinely good value the moment it drops below ~$175.
• Con: 60Hz, LPDDR4x, no fast charging, older radios — a full generation behind on nearly every axis.
• Con: At its $199 MSRP it is strictly dominated by a $229 successor.
• Con: The neighborhood, in Phil Retro's word — a device outpaced by its own shadow.

The Rating

The Machine's scores, and the reasoning behind them. The Retroid Pocket 6 earns a 9/10 — not because it is exciting, because it plainly is not, but because it is the correct purchase at its price by a margin wide enough to make the decision for you. It does everything the 5 does, better, for thirty dollars more, and it does the hard sixth-generation work with headroom to spare. RetroDodo's 8.4 reflects the boredom; our half-point above it reflects the value math, which is merciless in the 6's favor. It loses the last point to its own timidity and to a price that keeps drifting up.

The Retroid Pocket 5 earns a 7/10 in 2026 — a score that would have been a 9 at launch and has been dragged down entirely by circumstance. It is the same fine handheld it always was. It simply lives thirty dollars beneath something better, and no amount of engineering can fix a problem that is really a pricing problem. Wait for the sale, buy it at $150, and it climbs back toward that launch-day 9. Pay full freight for it while the 6 exists, and you have volunteered for the value crisis. The Machine's verdict is the one the market already reached: buy the 6, or buy the 5 on discount, but do not, under any circumstances, pay two hundred dollars for the older machine.