Word on the street is that the disc-less PS5 made up about 20% of the total consoles available and the Series S was significantly lower than that. That was what I heard from people who work at Gamestop and their allocations.
I personally think both discless consoles are stupid decisions with the PS5 one being even dumber. Saving $100 to not have a disc drive is not very enticing at all and it was probably Sony's panic response after hearing about the Series S coming out or something behind the scenes. I'm just glad that games on PS5 will just have 1 target hardware though and I think games will ultimately look better on PS5 in the long run than Xbox since they have like 5 Xbox pieces of hardware alone to target and make sure games run fine on.
That's a fair assessment too I think. From a "If we are going to create a less expensive version of our console, what should it look like?" standpoint, I think MS has a much more complete solution. A more realized vision that has some coherence and actually costs less for MS to make. At 60% of the price of the Series X it seems like a good (plausible) way to pursue a different demographic. Which isn't to say it will be crazy successful.
After some reflection, I think I am even more surprised neither company came out with a $999 SKU. I know, I know, that sounds nuts but people pay that for phones and many other devices. I mean, Apple prices iPads into that realm and I am sure they sell some. If there had been a PS5+ at launch that had maybe 24GB of ram, a GPU with ~2x the CU's at maybe a lower clock speed and lets say 2TB of usable (so like 3x PS5) flash I think that at maybe a 3:1 (normal to + models) they would have sold all they could have made. To me that would have made way more waves than slicing out the UHD drive to hit a $400 price point. Merchandising wise, it would have made the $500 version look like a great marginal utility pick and made the $200 difference between the Series S and the Series X look less significant.
Case in point: NVIDIA sold all the 3080's they had on hand the very next day. That's a $700 PC component that needs a ~$1,000 PC to even make sense. Now I know that consoles & PC's aren't the same utility wise, my point is there would be people who were willing to buy the + model by virtue of it even existing and thinking about how much use they'll get out of it.
I also think it would have just straight buried MS when it came to making it obvious which console a "real gamer" should buy. Flip it for MS over Sony, but it's not as compelling due to the weaker hardware still being supported and lack of exclusives coming.