Entering the last console generation the hard way

My son's friend just straight up gave him a Playstation 4 a few weeks back. I have no idea what the circumstances are in which you have too many PS4s, but there we are.

Unfortunately, it had been in storage for a while and someone had attempted a repair on it (for what? I don't know). So after buying a couple $5 games we found the CD drive just didn't want to work. I'm not the biggest fan of digital games because of course you don't actually own them, not to mention the drive sounds like it's gonna take off even if there's no disc in it.

So I did what any insane person would do: I ordered a drive from iFixit, a site with a 40%-complete tutorial on how to replace it. Turns out, the actual method for replacing the optical drive in a PS4 Slim is "just take the whole god damn console apart." That quarter inch of thickness saved over the standard model comes at the expense of modularity.

I also replaced the spinning 500GB hard drive with a 1TB SSD, which was no big deal — there's a sled that can be loosened with a single screw and any SATA laptop drive can be plugged right in.

Overall... significantly harder than upgrading a PC. But now we have a working PS4 and have been diving into Spider-Man (him) and Horizon: Zero Dawn (me), all for about $50 and some stressful tiny screw replacement.