Sony is selling them with little to no profit as they expect to earn on games. Guess why their capabale and cheap hardware is locked down to avoid using it for anything except playing bought games ;)

Anyway you can jailbreak ps4 to 5.0.5 firmware and there are unpublished exploits in existence that are waiting for ps5 to be released.

Looks like I found that "home server" to replace my over-use of cloud resources that I've been looking for!

Well, let me recomend something else, check asrock mini-itx motherboards with on-board cpu. You can get those for ~150 euros, throw in some ram (~60 euros) and some disk (100euro) + some chasis (Phenom mini-itx for instance, ~100euros). For home server this will work great :)

I am running home server (100% self hosted including emails) with J1900-itx motherboard with 20Tb of disk space (zraid) for years. No need to bother with ps4/5.

Well, your described bundle would be over 400€ then you can purchase used PS4 at least half that price and even cheaper.

Yes, but ps4 is gaming rig and you will have to jailbreak it every reboot. It depends on what you intend to run, raspberry pi 4 and sd card could be just more then enough for some people. Those prices were over the thumb, my motherboard with cpu is there since 2014 and is now $60 while it is more than enough and with going minimal (ram, chasis, disk - with ps4 you will get 1tb at most) you can pull it of under ps4 price. At the end, if you divide those 400 euros by 6 years, you are at price of 5.55 euro / month (not to mention you can reuse chasis and disks when upgrading) and it is low power setup (measured with 4 disks was 33 watts).

Jailbreaking could be nice for other <wink> unnamed purposes.

I recently bought an Ivy Bridge CPU low power CPU + motherboard for $35 and 8 GiB of ram for $25. No need to buy new hardware if you can do away with old.

Maybe they sell the H/W at a loss (especially considering R&D + Marketing spend) - and the real strategy is to turn a profit on PSPlus, licensing and taking a cut out of game distribution. If that's the case... you or me building a linux cluster will actually hurt them =)

Not maybe, that's exactly what they do.

The PS3 had dual-boot support for Linux early on, for a couple years after launch. It was removed in a software update a week or two after I decided to try it. I don't see Sony doubling back on that one, but you never know.