Turning off the PlayStation 4 was a piece of cake. You’d hold down the PS button, maneuver to the “Power” menu, and click “Turn off.” After years with the system, it likely became second-nature: hold PS, down, right, down, X. You could probably do it with your eyes closed—or, more likely, and more helpfully, with the TV off.
The process to turn off the PlayStation 5 isn’t difficult, per se, but it sure is different. With Sony’s new console, you can’t hold down the PS button to shut it down. You have to hit the PS button—tap, not hold—and scroll to the power icon, all the way on the right side of the functions bar that pops up. Clicking on that icon will pull up a slate of familiar power options, where you can put your PS5 in rest mode, turn it off, or restart it.
But there’s a faster method. Just do what Derek Zoolander could not and go left.
We at Kotaku received units to test some weeks back. The new way of doing things was among a handful of initial quirks that tripped us up. But, like Eratosthenes or Magellan or whoever is officially credited with figuring out that the world isn’t flat, we quickly figured out you could go the long (short?) way around. The PS5’s control center is a circumnavigational tool, not a static, linear one, so tabbing left from the home icon will take you to the power icon.
Of course, this spits in the face of years of muscle memory. There’s also the matter of the control center itself. When you hit the PS button, you’ll have to scroll down from a news icon to get to the main function bar. In other words, your new muscle-memory method should be this: tap PS, down, left, X, down, X. Easy, right? (If you just want to put your PS5 into rest mode—which will suspend any open games, download update files, and charge any plugged-in controllers—skip that second “down.”)
If you’re some sort of rebel, I suppose you could also just unplug the power cord, but the system will irritably beep at you when you plug it back in. You’ll also get the requisite warning about how that was a bad idea and how you shouldn’t have done that, with, oddly, some undertones about how you should drop and give Sony 50? I haven’t bought into that last one yet. Don’t think I could if I wanted to.
There’s a whole lot to learn about this new machine, including how to automatically invert your Y-axis and to (finally!) check your playtime stats. For a comprehensive rundown of all the starter stuff you should know—and for a place to share some of your own discoveries—don’t miss our big tips post about the PS5.