Effiectively its 12-19 years old now, for me, while I understand it also kinda falls under "who cares" because homebrew always was always somewhat equal to piracy.
Effiectively its 12-19 years old now, for me, while I understand it also kinda falls under "who cares" because homebrew always was always somewhat equal to piracy.
I can't speak for everyone but personally I find there's a moral imperative in making sure that we can actually own the devices we buy. Comments and sentiments like these needlessly devalue the work being done to achieve this, and is part of why the broader homebrew community is bitter about it.
FWIW the price performance ratio of older consoles was better than what you get today. It was impossible to find a high definition video player for under $1000, except for the Xbox. People were more motivated to do real, non-piracy homebrew.
Today, you can buy a raspberry pie for $40. I think that must have something to do with the fading of homebrew.
Gimmicks and ease-of-hacking also matter IMO.
With the Switch, I believe we are seeing the "threat model" (from Nintendo's PoV) shift from on-device hacking to emulation, which is far more scalable and resilient to vuln fixes (system only needs to be hacked "once" to get crypto secrets and to dump code). This enables large-scale piracy and high financial stakes, see the ToTK debacle.
On the other hand, there's no (?) handheld system with 3D like the 3DS; and playing DS/3DS games on emulator feels a bit awkward.
The only thing I'm using my hacked Switch 1 is to dump/restore save files. Thanks to cloud saves and local save transfer, my other Switch units don't need to be hacked.
Unfortunately for Nintendo, reverse-engineering a console to run code the first party has not authorized is not actually a violation of any law. Nintendo surely was grumpy at them, but they had no leg to stand on.
[1] And still does, see their takedown of yuzu, who was openly allowing and encouraging Switch piracy in the Discord server.