When you turn on a console, you have to wait 30 minutes now for everything to update.
I still have no fucking clue how they've managed to make system updates so slow. You could potentially argue most of that is download time, but it isn't. Even when the downloads are finished, applying the system update always seems to take 15-20 minutes, and I can't figure out what they could possibly be doing that takes so long.
It can't be massive binary delta patching, since the OS isn't that big and typically OS-level patches (Windows, Linux, and MacOS all do it this way) just involve plopping new files down on top of old ones instead of patching. Even if you're taking a complete filesystem snapshot pre-patch to allow for a rollback in case SHTF, that can't possibly take more than a second or two (if you're competent and using real snapshots), or a couple of minutes (if you're not, and you're just going "lol imma make a tarball!"). Extracting even a one-gigabyte update (rare) should be near-instantaneous on this kind of hardware, too. 'member how they made a huge fuss about how fast the PS5's storage subsystem is? Like, "world-first" I/O performance in consumer-grade gear? What happened to that?
There can't possibly be enough post-extraction commands or scripts to execute to justify a ten minute wait either. Individually verifying SHA hashes on every single fucking file should be similarly near-instant with the CPU and storage system on the PS5. What kind of post-extraction "housekeeping" would you need to do, anyway? Are they effectively doing a full OS reinstall with every update or something? De-registering and uninstalling old packages and installing new ones to replace them, piece-by-piece, at such a granular scale that maybe they're running the equivalent of two hundred separate "dpkg remove foo && dpkg install foo" commands for each OS patch?
Part of me genuinely wonders if they're not just fucking with their customers. The patch downloads instantly but the progress bar fakes slowness just for shits & grins because it can. The patches apply near-instantly but they just make players sit and wait, just because "fuck you that's why."
Not even modern Windows 11 Jeet Edition™ has this kind of performance problem with updates. Besides the comical fuckups of "accidentally deleting all user accounts' data across the entire system volume" caliber (yes, that happened), even Windows manages to do a decent job with updates these days, downloading in the background, staging files in advance prior to reboot, doing as much as possible beforehand, then applying patches on the next reboot (likely triggering a second reboot to finish it because lol it's fuckin' Windows, when
doesn't it need a reboot?), then running cleanup scripts and finalizing, then it's done. Even big updates only take a couple minutes to apply now.
WTF, Sony? How are you making
Microsoft of all people look competent?
