In my opinion. I think they will churn out a PS6 and that will kill them when it has to compete with a newly galvanised Nintendo that has new AAA games from big Japanese publishers while Sony will be even more lacking in exclusives. Sony has enough money to make a final push with a new console even if it is in vain.
Sony releasing yet another more powerful system so soon when Nintendo is dominating the market with the equivalent of an 8 year old Android tablet would be suicidal. Even normies are noticing the effect of diminishing returns of graphics in video games. Graphics reached the point of "good enough" years ago and only pretentious Western AAA developers keep pumping exorbitant budgets to produce hyper realistic visual for glorified walking simulators (Senua's Sacrifice 2, God of War Ragnarok).
Nintendo figured out that the graphics arms race approach to game development was a fool's errant and they understood that developers just cannot keep up with the exorbitant monetary and manpower demand this type of development requires. You better believe a lot of AA game developers are going to focus on handhelds system level power and stylized visuals as their target because the return on investment is higher and the development times are shorter. Trying to develop games exclusively for ever more expensive hardware for a shrinking audience of die hard sycophants is no longer viable, there is no money to be made there.
Compare that to Nintendo who only needs to release hardware that is adequate for their needs at a mass market price point and they are golden,
That being said, I don't even think Sony knows what the hell they are doing anymore. After the move to California they have become completely out of touch with reality. Concord shows just in how much of an ideological bubble they are trapped in that NOBODY in 6-8 years of development raised their concerns about this game being a train wreck in the making.
Sony is not going to announce a PS6 but there are rumors of them toying with the idea of a dedicated handheld again (The Playstation Portal was a test to see the market's reaction) Sony is so unoriginal it would not be beneath them to attempt to copy the success of the Switch or the Steam Deck. My guess is that they might try to launch in a year or two a portable PS5 that is 100% compatible with the base PS5, fully digital and with cross saves so players can play the same games on a PS5/Pro and on this theoretical portable.
If instead Sony releases a completely separate handheld with different specs and separate library of games, developers are going to tell Sony to go fuck themselves,
Developers are not going to waste their time with a repeat of the PSVita.
$800 and it STILL can not run PS3 games natively. There is no reason why even the base model PS5 doesn't have a PS3 emulator built-in.
Sony has zero incentive to add such a functionality. They want you buying their freshly made goyslop and the umpteenth remaster of their previous goyslop franchises from last gen. By releasing the PS5 Pro without a disc drive they are telling you that they do not care about your older physical collection of games.
Meanwhile RPCS3 emulation just keeps getting better and better, the project already acheived 70% playable status for the PŜ3 library, So long you have a PC that meets the requirements you don't have to wait for Sony to do anything.
Not shocking in the least, PS5 already uses AMD tech. This is the easiest way to ensure the feature would be implemented. The same is true for Switch 2 using a more powerful variant of Nvidia's Tegra chips to ensure backwards compativility.
