Same price, less storage. Shrinkflation at its finest.
Sony plans to release a new PS5 Slim All-Digital console with an 825GB SSD, reducing storage from the previous 1TB to optimize production costs amid rising expenses. The PS5 Slim Standard with a disc drive will retain the 1TB SSD, and the updated model is expected to launch in Europe first.
Because it is cheaper to manufacture.
They buy storage with 12 channels, 512Gib Nand Chip per channel. This means each SSD has 512Gib x 12ch = 6144Gib / 8 = 768GiB of storage, or 825GB.
Key:
Gib = gibibit, 1024⁴ bits
GiB = gibibyte, giga/binary/byte, 1024⁴ x 8 bits
GB = gigabyte, giga(decimal)byte, 1000⁴ x 8 bits