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&#x2F;accessories, games, subscriptions, etc.  That&#x27;s no longer the case nowadays - the XB1 and PS4 are both being sold at a profit (or at least not a loss).<p>I think the trend away from specialty processors with speciality GPUs attached like the Xenon [note: different from <i>Xeon</i>] 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&#x27;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.<p>The Cell is actually a really amazing processor in a lot of ways.  It&#x27;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&#x27;s really fast.  It&#x27;s actually only recently that general-purpose x86 has caught up enough that it&#x27;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.