GEC Marconi in the UK ran Software Engineering Apprenticeship programs 25 years ago; they were sick of getting COBOL programmers from schools and universities so made a more technically oriented program that taught fun stuff like C, Pascal, LISP, Ada alongside computer operations, QA, project management, hardware design and electronics.

I bought a PS3 and all it does is play Blueray discs or stream video to the projector. Games on PC 100% of the time in my house; that way I get to use a keyboard and a mouse and not a bolt-on keypad and gaming controller.

I've done this many times. It boils down to simple stuff and its all a trade off; time vs money vs quality. Time is usually the key where I work as the environment is a highly changing one. Deploying new hardware is generally less risk and faster than upgrading software, and uses different people from the (always too busy) software teams. So it buys you time which is often fine for the business folks that don't care about how inefficient that algorithm or SQL query is as long as the business needs are met. However, there's only so many times you can band-aid this stuff until hardware cannot solve it. When you do new software, its a full development cycle. If it requires major rethink on the design you can bet new issues are raised in production when it goes live; the business do care about this and you have to do some extra preparation to deal with these new risks as the new software is rolled out. Having gone all through is, the goal-posts change again. New activity happens from business that drives software in ways you didn't imagine or get the chance to implement for ahead of time. You're back to square one on the hardware versus software again.