It's not hard to handle it another way

"How to handle it any other way is the difficult question"

The root cause of the problem was that Sony were selling a very useful bit of kit for a loss, in the hopes of getting more people addicted to their overpriced games.

The other way of handling it would be to simply not sell the hardware at a loss. Instead, make money on every unit you sell and it wouldn't matter what use the customers were making of the hardware.

Even better, since you are no longer subsidising the hardware, the software doesn't have to be quite so overpriced which would give Sony a bit more leeway to undercut their rivals.

If Sony are unable to make the hardware at a price customers would buy at, then maybe thats a sign that it just wasn't a good design to start with for it's stated objective of playing a computer game.