Curious
In: Engineering
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
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