TBH the Xbox 360 console was like a refresh of XBMC. One of the greatest things about the 360 out of the box was it played popular video codecs directly from USB storage - unmodded!

Unheard of at the time.

I had an early model PSX console in high school and bought the plug and play mod chip online in 2000 or so. Rented a lot of games and bought a lot of verbatim blue bottoms

Later a USB plus 1 wire mod chip for the PS2 that let me play backups and homebrew

According to sources, a modified original Xbox running the latest XBMC was put on the center podium, was shown off, and the executives had ordered the engineers to "make the new xbox do this"...and it was.

I was blown away when half way through the setup of my 360 my desktop running Vista helpfully chimed in saying it found the 360 and offered to let me stream all my MP3's right to it while playing games

Security is about reducing the frequency of events, and the impact of those events- Not making things philosophically impossible.

I think the trouble is that people kept finding ways back from arbitrary code execution in a limited environment to running pirated games and cheating in online games, and Sony continually failed to actually manage that.

XBox vs PS2: XBox was faster, but PS2 launched earlier, was cheaper, and had more games, so won the generation.

XBox 360 vs PS3: Sony reacts to Microsoft by making the PS3 more powerful than the 360 and more expensive. Microsoft reacts by getting more games and really doubling down on Halo (the biggest draw to XBox back then). XBox wins the generation.

Note: this is from memory, didn't check sources!

If you remove the SPE's from the equation (which many developers did) the PS3 has a much slower 2 Ghz Dual Core PPC64 CPU, while the Xbox has a 3.2Ghz Triple Core (6 thread) PPC64

The extra threads aren't directly as useful as games back then were almost entirely single-threaded, a trend that has only begun to really change course in the last decade or so (partially due to the Xbone and PS4 having anemic Bulldozer derived CPU's that had weak single-thread performance)

IIRC it's not even a dual core but a single core with two threads.

Sony really dropped the ball with the PS3 chip.

It's a shame they invested hundreds of millions or even billions in this new, hot, complicated to use chip, only for it to be completely surpassed by off the shelf x86 parts.

Sony though the chip would be so good they could sell it to be used in super computers for years to come, but by the time it was out, x86 had basically caught up and no customers cared about buying their cell processor.

The winner of 7th generation was clearly Nintendo with their Wii: over 100 million units.

And the funny thing is 2nd place: PS3! Just at the end of generation it managed to oversold X360

Piling onto that with "we're getting rid of game sharing or the resell market" and "our new console is going to be your entertainment hub, i.e. it's going to be jammed full of shit most gamers don't want!" and the launch was just... ugh.

It was! I was a pre-teen then but I remember modded controllers and getting into modded lobbies. The only modding I did was USB modding my avatar and gamerscore, only to login a month or so later to the prompt that I was banned forever. What a lifetime ago!