"These price increases have multiple intertwining causes, some direct and some less so: inflation, pandemic-era supply crunches, the unpredictable trade policies of the Trump administration, and a gradual shift among console makers away from selling hardware at a loss or breaking even in the hopes that game sales will subsidize the hardware. And you never want to rule out good old shareholder-prioritizing corporate greed.
But one major factor, both in the price increases and in the reduction in drastic “slim”-style redesigns, is technical: the death of Moore’s Law and a noticeable slowdown in the rate at which processors and graphics chips can improve."
It’s not that they’re not improving like they used to, it’s that the die can’t shrink any more.
Price cuts and “slim” models used to be possible due to die shrinks. A console might have released on 100nm, and then a process improvement comes out that means it can be made on 50nm, meaning 2x as many chips on a wafer and half the power usage and heat generation. This allowed smaller and cheaper revisions.
Now that the current ones are already on like 4nm, there’s just nowhere to shrink to.
Which itself is a gimmick, they’ve just made the gates taller, electron leakage would happen otherwise.