If I wanted an incrementally upgradable console with games as a service and backwards compatibility, I'd just plug a 360 controller into a computer running Steam. In fact, that's exactly what I do.
In Sony's case upgradable has meant forcibly downgradeable.
Many bought a PS3 solely because it ran Linux, this was removed by an update.
Sony's famous battle over removing 'other-OS' and its shameful tactics against Hotz exemplified a culture of mistrust of end users and disdain for 'off-label' uses.
Sadly it has a long history of this culture, q.v. the 1990s software removal of Digital-Video-in for European digital video cameras - preventing one dumping back to digital tape - removing much of the value.
Sony, itself, has expressed regrets, like the loss of the digital Walkman market with their near unusable proprietary music codecs that took hours to transcode & upload.
Sony, genius engineering hamstrung by legal.
Explicitly, by their vast media catalogue & the piracy boojums entailed.
When the superior Betamax lost the format wars to VHS because of selective media licensing in the 1980s, Sony responded by becoming a media empire.
I think you're really stretching it by saying "many" bought the PS3 because it ran Linux. Many bought the PS3 because it played PS3 games, that's it. Linux on a desktop PC is only a couple percent if they are lucky, no way console people were anywhere near that.
It was a subsidised platform with great specs, the cheapest linux box available and ran on a tv, never mind free console & media player. A lot of my student contempories bought it solely for Linux as it was the cheapest way to a Linux platform.
I cite the Condor cluster using 1760 PS3s, once the 33rd fastest super-computer in the world. There are many other published Playstation clusters (PS2 also). The cell processor was highly desirable and very powerful for the price.
I will always thank Sony as 'otherOS' allowed me to evangelise Linux & indeed computing to many families who never considered owning a computer. To kids passively consuming games I could show the power to create them with Linux and turn a passion for gaming into a passion for coding - I was not alone in this.
'OtherOS' use was both significant, socially important, and moreover printed on the box when bought - this seems contractual & IMHO Hotz was in the right to re-enable it.
Sony have world leading engineers and tech, that perfection should deliberately be downgraded for non-engineering reasons breaks my heart.
Yes, the subsidies used to factor into that bigtime. The hardware was sold at a loss, in the expectation of making a profit on controllers/accessories, games, subscriptions, etc. That's no longer the case nowadays - the XB1 and PS4 are both being sold at a profit (or at least not a loss).
I think the trend away from specialty processors with speciality GPUs attached like the Xenon [note: different from Xeon] in the XB360 and the Cell in the PS3, to commodity Jaguar x86 APUs with onboard iGPUs is a big reason behind that. Honestly the XBone is really no different than going out and building yourself a mITX PC on the FM2+ socket, for Linux purposes. Nowadays you're better off with something like the Raspberry Pi for intro-to-computing, although I am a big fan of the ECS Liva series myself.
The Cell is actually a really amazing processor in a lot of ways. It's really more of a SMP system with a ring-topology interconnect than a traditional SMT processor. You have to specifically build your design around it, but if you do so it's really fast. It's actually only recently that general-purpose x86 has caught up enough that it's feasible to emulate it. It would have been a very desirable piece of hardware for HPC, if you had stuff tailored to that architecture.
I tried that for most of 2013, but ultimately didn't stick with it. Although Steam/SteamOS has proper 10-foot support, individual games tend to not work well in that mode. Many games lack controller support on PC that they have on consoles (many of Valve's own games, the Mass Effect games) or have annoying launchers (the new Elder Scrolls or Fallout games, for example). Some games also run in a borderless fullscreen mode that doesn't work correctly with Steam's Big Picture mode (Mercenary Kings is one example of this).
Consoles, on the other hand, are designed around a ten-foot OS with none of the launcher garbage and gamepad-only controls; the tighter integration sands off these rough edges. Personally, I'd love to have my (substantial) collection of PC games working on my TV, but it's not quite there yet.
Stream from where? I use the Steam Streaming with hardware encoding and decoding, literally from one room to another, over gigabit ethernet, and yes, I do get 1080p@60fps. The experience is still not good enough to play fps games or racing games. While I can recommend it to play Dark Souls or something like Dragon Age, you can really see artifacts creeping in from time to time,and I'm also sure the colours lose vibrancy in the encoding process, the overall image looks duller.
Over the internet? Where do you live, a datacenter?
A box 5-20 feet away? Why not plug it into the screen in front of you? I never really understood the draw of game streaming when you can't use the source device in any way (like Steam, Xbox One streaming).
> I never really understood the draw of game streaming when you can't use the source device in any way (like Steam, Xbox One streaming).
My gaming PC's 30-40ft away from the living room and master bedroom, in what used to be my office. Steam streaming is convenient because I've got plenty of underpowered hardware around, and I can access the PC's power anywhere in the home. It's convenient, and keeps the hardware away from my infant son's increasingly-roving hands.
In Sony's case upgradable has meant forcibly downgradeable.
Many bought a PS3 solely because it ran Linux, this was removed by an update.
Sony's famous battle over removing 'other-OS' and its shameful tactics against Hotz exemplified a culture of mistrust of end users and disdain for 'off-label' uses.
Sadly it has a long history of this culture, q.v. the 1990s software removal of Digital-Video-in for European digital video cameras - preventing one dumping back to digital tape - removing much of the value.
Sony, itself, has expressed regrets, like the loss of the digital Walkman market with their near unusable proprietary music codecs that took hours to transcode & upload.
Sony, genius engineering hamstrung by legal.
Explicitly, by their vast media catalogue & the piracy boojums entailed.
When the superior Betamax lost the format wars to VHS because of selective media licensing in the 1980s, Sony responded by becoming a media empire.
Sony has broken its own tech ever since.