Sony has a long history of releasing slimmed down versions of its games consoles in or around halfway through their life cycles. This was true of the PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable and it’s looking increasingly like it might be the case with the PlayStation 3.

This is one of the box-shots that's doing the rounds lately.

While rumours have abounded for the past few months that we’d be seeing a slimmed down PS3 sooner rather than later, Ars Technica has posted one of the most impressive confluences of rumours, snapshots and industry projections we’ve ever seen… and it all points to a slimmed down PS3 in the not-too-distant future.

For now, details on just how different a news PS3 will be from the existing model are scant. It’d be our guess that things won’t be changed up too much, seeing as the only hardware Sony makes that seems to have undergone serious alteration in the changeover was the PSP Slim. It’ll be interesting to see if and how performance is effected, but it seems unlikely that we’d see the release of new hardware if the kinks hadn’t all been worked out already.

This was a really popular early mockup of a slimmed down PS3

You can read more about the PS3 Slim, including an excruciating amount of detail on the hardware buying side of things, over at ArsTechnica, here. I’d heavily recommend it, it’s an excellent piece of internet detective work.