Curious
In: Engineering
I’m not an expert, but I think it’s because it already has its own software installed and isn’t made to support another?
Take a MacBook for example, why can’t you download Windows on it?
You can its called jailbreaking.
There is a whole list of alternative xbox operaring systems based on linux.
Window still needs a standard PC BIOS to boot, which PlayStations/Xboxes lack.
Sony and Microsoft also use a ton of copy protection to stop you running unapproved software, which makes it very hard to use something like Linux on it.
Allegedly hackers have got Linux to run on the PS5 but I can’t find definitive proof of this.
You can. X-Box is just running a modified version of windows. Sony used to support being able to do so on the PS3. As someone else jailbreaking is a term for doing it against the companies will. So why did Sony take it away and why companies try to block us from doing so? Pirating. Being able to side-load software or a different OS makes breaking games DRM a lot easier. Breaking DRM means you can just download a copy of the cracked game and off you go. So the answer always comes back to money.
Edit to add: You can’t go out and install windows on a PS3. The operating system needs to know how to talk to the hardware. That what drivers are for. Also the CPU is not one you would find in a PC. So only certain builds of Linux were ever made to work. You used to be able to install and run windows on Macs. Untill they switched to their own chips that Microsoft doesn’t support.
Its because the manufactures do not want you to.
Like you said they have all the components needed to run windows or linux on them so they only reason you can’t is because the manufactures do not want you to, so they lock them down .
Now why do they do this? Well many times when you buy an xbox or playstation microsoft or sony usually does not make money on it, sometimes they will even lose money
They will recoup the cost as you buy games, so an xbox may cost them $500 and they may sell it to you for $400 meaning they lose $100 on every sale. However they are counting on you to buy games or sign up for some subscriptions and those will make them money , hopefully over the $100 loss they took selling you the xbox
So if they allowed people to install an general OS on it, well lots of people would buy it and only use it to run windows or linux and not buy games thus costing them money
So they will purposefully lock down these systems so you cannot do that.
The playstation 3 allowed you to do this, you could install linux on it. However the problem was as described above and sony really did not make any money just selling the PS3. However some people figured out the PS3 was a cheap computer that actually had some decent hardware in it, so universities or companies would buy 1000s of them, link them together to make a cheap supercomputer and this was costing sony a lot of money as they were losing money on selling the PS3 and these people were not going out and buying games so they were not able to recoup the cost and make money by selling games to them
Not all CPUs are the same, and consoles don’t have standard motherboards and hardware in general to run Windows unless it’s specifically modified for it.
It’s the same reason why an iPhone or an iPad has RAM, CPU and storage but you can’t run Windows 11 on it.
Analogy: consoles are like printers. Games are like ink. To sell consoles for cheap, Microsoft and Sony have to make their profits on the “ink” (games) and the most effective way to do that is by forcing you to buy _their_ “ink” or at least buy it through _their_ store.
Longer version:
Console hardware is subsidized by the manufacturers on the idea that they’ll be able to make up the difference through profits from selling console games. That’s why they’re much cheaper than PCs with similar performance.
Restricting what software can run on the console is necessary for this business model to work: you can’t benefit from the hardware subsidy unless Microsoft or Sony also gets their cut from you buying games. Otherwise, the Xbox and Playstation are just competing with similarly-specced PCs at the expense of Microsoft and Sony, and the income from them is diluted across other platforms like Steam, Epic, or GoG. It’s unlikely that consoles would be profitable at the same hardware price point if they didn’t also lock users into the console maker’s marketplace.
(I’m basing this on recent arguments used by Microsoft when they complained about not being able to put XCloud on iOS. Apple doesn’t want Microsoft to be able to set up their own little marketplace without giving Apple their 30% cut. Microsoft argued this was anti-competitive. Apple pointed at Microsoft’s own practices of locking down the market for Xbox games. Microsoft argued that it’s okay for Xbox to do it because it’s not a “general-purpose” computer whereas iPhones are.)
The producers of said systems locks down the boot-loaders since if they are not running ‘their operating system’ then they might not get any more revenue from said system. Linux usually has support for all kinds of cpu’s. Often when a console or system is end of life, that’s when the hackers brings some kind of way to ‘break out of software-jail’.
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