[chrismorgan]

Yeah, no way they overlooked something like that. I had my Sony α6100 overheat within 20 minutes on mere 1080p video when the ambient temperature was at least 45°C. When these things run hot, it’s easy to feel where the hottest areas of the body are, and attaching a heatsink is obvious, and at that time, dumping heat to the tripod mount was the first thing that occurred to me when I contemplated how I might do it.

[samatman]

The flip side of this is that Sony (finally) made an APS-C mirrorless, in the α6600, which has a recording time that's only limited by power or storage.

So it was never impossible, and it isn't just a Nerf to segment customers into the cinema bracket. It's just an area where they're willing to compromise.

Without IBIS, the αN < 6500s aren't great for many video applications, they're photo cameras which can also take some video. I suspect that Sony just didn't realize the degree to which the YouTube generation would be using their entry-level mirrorless systems for extensive video. Consider that it took them a generation to make flip screens standard, and that they bumped the battery size and ability to record indefinitely on (only) the model which has IBIS: that's a nudge, saying "If you want to record a lot of video, the α6600 is the model you want".

[chrismorgan]

It was the α6000, α6300 and α6500 that were time-limited, because they generated more heat in their video encoding. The newer α6100, α6400 and α6600 don’t run so hot, using a newer and better chip for the encoding. You’re wrong about the ability to record indefinitely: this is not specific to the α6600; all three of the newer generation get it. I’m recording 100 minute videos weekly on my α6100 with no sweat now (plugged in by USB, otherwise the battery will be down to 5–10% by this time—with the camera fixed in place for these recordings I also don’t care about image stabilisation, whether in-lens or in-body), it was only having trouble in the middle of summer when the ambient temperature was at least 45°C.

[samatman]

Alright, good to know.

I think that's more evidence that the overheating problem wasn't a deliberate attempt to segment customers into the cinema bracket, but rather something Sony didn't realize would be such a problem, because who is going to want to film 100 minutes on their photo camera? Practically everyone as it turns out.

Yeah, they could have and should have added better heat dissipation: but they can and should make (much) better software as well, and don't, because... it's Sony.