Glacier White

Sony’s releasing a white PS4, and I can see the appeal immediately. The standard console is a bulky black rectangle, the kind of thing that announces itself in your entertainment setup whether you want it to or not. A white one would sit there differently—it’d actually work with a clean, minimal room instead of demanding design forgiveness.

It’s a smaller revision they’ve released now, the new slim model, and this Glacier White version comes with 500GB and two controllers in matching white. They’re saying it’ll be available sometime in early 2017—honestly, I’d almost forgotten about this tier of console refresh. There’s a version with more power, the PS4 Pro, but Sony’s keeping that one black only. Of course they are. The white option is for people who bought into the minimalist thing, not the performance obsessives.

I get why someone would want this. Your apartment is clean, your furniture’s restrained, you’ve got maybe three books on a shelf and they’re sorted by spine color, and then your console sits there looking like it was salvaged from an office breakroom. A white one actually plays along. Design matters, even for boxes you shove under a TV.

But I’d probably buy it and then never feel like it was actually mine, the way you don’t feel like you own anything that’s too perfect to touch. Still, there’s something cool about a company shipping design as a basic option instead of a special edition. Makes you wonder if they noticed someone, or if it was just math—how many people want the aesthetic without the compromise.