if you listen closely to the sales pitch, when they mention hacking its about COSMETIC hacking: modding the case. that's it.
They've talked about hacking the hardware.. for instance they said they were making pieces of the electrical components in different modules to better facilitate this.
Of course they probably have more important reasons for doing this.
the plastic case is legally "hardware".
they can claim that's all they meant.
at least that's the feeling I got from the video.
maybe they got solder points for extra LEDs or other ports.
the whole sales pitch was carefully crafted to sound more open than it most likely is.
with a lot of vague wording with large difference between the geeks' definitions of the words and actual legal definitions.
I do believe they can deliver what they claim, just not what people think they claim.
its going to be
subsidized with the online gaming subscription service.
this and mass production is how they'll cover the console cost.
so what if a few geeks buy one or two consoles to hack them, unlike PS3s they're not powerful enough to build supercomputer clusters.
they'll recoup that with the huge mass of people buying a 99$ Android console for their kids or themselves.
this is not new. a lot, if not all of netbook PCs sold in large stores are subsidized by including software and web links pre-installed with the OS such as Netflix and online gaming sites.
its like when AOL used to regularly and generously offered me free floppies in the mail, it was so nice of them.
