Is the proprietary vita memory card the worst design decision in the history of consoles?

Where there's a will there's a way, if the Vita was worth hacking it would have happened sooner.

Yes. They could only hack through downloaded PSP games for a while. There were a few other hacks, but it wasnt until henkaku in 2016, that blew the vita wide open to hackers.

It took a long time.

i'm not saying it didn't take time and was easy, but how in the hell would those memory cards be what was stopping them?

True, but was it worth it? I’d imagine that it would be better to have a hit console like PSP despite the piracy problem, than to have a stillborn console like Vita without piracy.

And even if they really wanted to be so adamant with their proprietary memory cards, there’s no excuse for the horrible, horribe prices they put on them. It’s like a mandatory extra tax on the already high price for a portable console.

No, the initial plan of having the Xbone not function without a daily online check-in or the Kinect plugged in will forever be the worst

PSP was hacked to kingdom come, but what made it popular was it was a solid music player when smartphones were non existent.

Their shit memory cards couldn't hold many songs, games or pics at low prices. Maybe a couple of CDs, a few camera moments, a movie, and one game, but I'm pushing it.

Making the psp and then the vita were stupid decisions too.
Also the cell processor nearly killed sony's game division.

If that was their thinking then that's silly. You don't protect consoles with proprietary peripherals, that's just a speed bump. You use a proper public key cryptography system with the private keys in protected memory inside some ASIC. Funnily enough that's exactly what they did, the memory cards were irrelevant, but at the time m2 memory sticks were deprecated, SD cards were a world of hurt where 90% of what's on the market was too slow and shit to be usable and so they had to make their own to avoid a bad experience.
Nintendo used SD on the switch because it's hard to avoid getting a UHS-1 at least and they still have to have support articles explaining that the 128gig you got off amazon is a shit pile chinese fake.
I don't blame sony at all for the vita memory card thing. If the console arrived a year later when SD was standardising on class 10 and they still did it then sure, but at the time of release they really didn't have a choice.

Not better if you're trying to appease third party publishers and developers, which is what Sony was trying to do. They couldn't be seen as simply letting the same shit happen all over again.

Good question. The memory card was a major hole to plug like the PSP. They must have plugged other holes(giggity) through software that I'm unaware of.

Also, the system was floundering and had little install base for any hacker to give a shit. Small install base due to slow trickle of games and shitty memory cards prices.

Among other reasons you listed, it was because one of the reasons the PSP was hacked so quickly was the ease of dumping core system files to memory card. The theory was that if you couldn't read the Vita's cards in other systems, it didn't matter if you figured out a way to get files onto it or even an exploit you could load via it.

Piracy isn't as big a motivator in the scene as people expect. A lot of the more capable homebrew devs look down on and even directly try to counter piracy where they can, they're generally just interested in using hardware to do things it usually couldn't. I mean there's a reason that the Vita's scene is way more active right now than the 3DS's, despite 3DS piracy being easier for far longer than Vita piracy.

The cell was unfortunate. IBM sold them a pig in a poke. It *was* quite literally "a supercomputer on a chip" except they invested all their money in making POWER5 cheaper and POWER6 being the new standard for data centres and abandoned Cell leaving Sony footing the bill for this expensive boondoggle. It was supposed to be the new compute standard for number crunching which would have meant Sony would be buying the IBM run-off for pennies on the dollar as they churned out 5GHz 32core parts for the server market.

Y'know I wouldn't mind the memory cards so much if they were actually good. But the 64gb cards have a high failure rate, and the read/write on these things are abysmal. Half the time I have to cancel a file transfer on the vita through the content manager by force shutting down the vita since it stops responding during the transfer and won't let me back out of that menu. Couple that with everytime I want to back up a save file, I have to back up the whole game because the saves are stupidly tied to the game makes me just not fucking care about my saves sometimes.

The save files were tied to games in order to make it harder to implement save-based exploits. No, really.

the cell is sony's own retarded fault.
ign.com/articles/2013/10/08/playstation-3-was-delayed-originally-planned-for-2005
They literally thought they could do without a GPU. This is what hubris from the ps2 did to them.
I'm almost confident in saying that the hubris they've developed from being such shit cunts with the ps4, charging for online, big middle finger to cross play, literally no security on psn so it leaks like a sieve and the overall shitty quality of the dualshock 4. I'm guessing the ps5 is going to be the xboner of next gen.
I could be wrong, but as anti-consumerist as they've been, I'm guessing it'll be like how Microsoft dropped the ball like fucking crazy with the xbone announcement.

That's right, and back then they were almost right to. GPUs at the time were very backward thinking. The Cell was forward thinking. But like the N64, if you have a cost target to hit, you have to scale back on the future A LOT and the end product usually winds up worse than the traditionally minded competition. But if IBM had delivered on their promises AND the PS3 had launched at a sensible price, developers would have spent the PS3/360 years complaining about how backward the 360 architecture was and how multi-plats were off the table.

For the rest of your post, I agree that it's looking like Sony will be "shitcunts" for the PS5.
Sadly it also looks like Microsoft haven't learned the right lessons from the XBone disaster so both companies are about to force the market in a direction it doesn't want to go.
Nintendo are off to the side making their own market as usual.
Dark days are coming.

>he doesn't know
my 64gb microsd vita would like to ha a word with you