Which components are married between mobo and Blu ray board?

And that's what I suspected since they got the OG Xbox so wrong. They really learned their lesson since the original was so easy to hack. Nintendo didn't learn much until the Switch though :P.

Nintendo Switch is probably among their most secure consoles, all major user access are signed with device/cartridge/user certificates and they reserve the ability to revoke them if they found anything wrong. Their web/OS platform is pretty secure, the problem comes from nVidia, their SoC vendor. The SoC has a serious unpatchable exploit which allowed booting into arbitrary code, making any homebrew technically possible.

Yep. The GC, Wii/Wii U were dead easy to hack. They were so insecure they didn't revise things like the optical drive and used epoxy on the pins used by early modchips to bypass the copy protection and region locking. The Wii U was also a joke since it was Wii based. The DS series was a series of exploits - even a specific game was used as an exploit on those.

That's how you know it was hard or nearly impossible to patch - epoxy on the pins used to do the region check and copy protection checks. I don't care about the piracy aspect - I just want the ability to play imports without multiple consoles so I generally have no reservations about modding region locked Nintendo systems and the PS1/PS2 for the same reason nor buying modded systems. The homebrew is a cool bonus.

I get why they sold the composite consoles by region (50/60Hz country variances and changes like NTSC-J vs. US NTSC) but region locks are a dick move.