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Holy hell what a jump! Yeesh, I’m glad I got one in January, but there’s no way I’d be paying 1k for it.
They raised it an extra $100 in Australia over the US price.
Should of been increased to ~AU$1320, is actually AU$1429. (AU$1049 last week)
Thanks Gabe :')
SM is going to cost like 1000+ isn’t it…
At this point, try closer to $1200-$1500, and that’s for the BASE model.
We so cooked
Might as well buy steam cookers instead.
Pretty sure it always was. Tge steam machine was already fucked by the time aome random guy wrote an article that just randomly assumed it’s gonna cost 500 dollars for no reason at all
Who was that dickwad?
Holy fuck. It’s happening.
I think so, if this is the price of the deck… well in the US at least, tariffs I guess?
It might be better to just go back to the drawing board on that one if even possible-
Scrap the board as is, go for Strix Halo but give it a big fat 150w PPT, give it 4x DDR5 slots instead of soldered LPDDR5X.
Don’t sell it with RAM or an SSD.
That’s not going to decrease the cost, as Strix Halo is expensive. See: the Framework Desktop.
And it needs LPDDR5X, though they could use SOCAMM modules. Framework tried, but I think they ran out of R&D time to work out the electrical gremlins.
SM?
BD
PP hee hee
Steam Machine
Sadomasochism.
😳
Oof I mean I’m glad they are back in stock again but that stings. I do see valve being the only company that would lower them as soon as they are able though. Public shareholders wouldn’t let them if they were public.
Nah, that’s not true. All of these companies would absolutely love to charge less for the console up front so that they can get recurring payments out of you elsewhere. It was a regular occurrence for decades that console prices would drop dramatically over time.
Less of an issue with Valve. They don’t have as much of a need for a hardware loss leader since they earn from Steam regardless of which hardware it’s running on.
As I understand it, none of the consoles are loss leading these days.
If they structure their supplier contracts anything like the auto industry does, that would only be because they are on the back end of the product’s production lifecycle.
I think they lost the appetite for loss leading around the time the PS4 and Xbox One came out. I have no insider information, but this is what I tend to hear from those that do. Nintendo famously doesn’t loss lead, and that’s a long standing policy, but the latest word on Switch 2 is that their price increase keeps them profitable but with smaller margins than they had when it initially launched.
Well, yeah, were a decade into the generation. If you’re still manufacturing a console at a loss 10 years after release you fucked up huge somewhere
Also, by virtue of the fact that the Deck and Steam Machine are de-facto PCs, if they made those products loss-leaders, they would get bought up to use for non-gaming purposes and reduce availability for their intended audience. The same thing happened to the PS3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
Holy fuck. How is it even competitive at this price?
Competitive with what, buying your own computer? Because that stuff is expensive too.
With the switch. Or the asus rog handheld, which as of now is only what, 50€ more? ( wonder how much that one will last at that price tho )
Those both went up in price as well. Everything with computer chips in it has gone up in price.
I just looked and the ROG ally is 599 and 999 at Best Buy with pickup available today.
The RAM and SSD have gotten that much more expensive to source. Anyone who sells a product with similar components either raises their price, or takes a loss.
Even laggy crap DDR4 RAM is at almost $6/GB; DDR5 (like the Deck uses) is double that. The absolute cheapest appropriate-sized 512GB M.2 drive is $100, from a no-name brand. The whole market has gone down the tubes thanks to AI companies buying up absolutely everything.
A year ago I got 2x SATA cheapo SSDs - 1TB at $56 and 2TB at $106. Today the same listings are over double that price.
Even HDDs are expensiver now. 2.5" 1TB is $60. In January I got 12TB WD HDD for $220. Today it is $460.
FUCK AI!
It’s weird that I’m actively rooting for China to do it’s thing and begin to rapidly pump out cheap memory modules in such high volumes that they are able to over-satiate demand and put a downward pressure on pricing.
Before anyone tries to accuse me of copium or some other affliction, I would like to remind you that this is EXACTLY China’s modus operandi for the past 20-something years.
Both Samsung & SK Hynix were just in the news for issuing their DRAM division staff annual bonuses of well over $300K USD from a 10-15% pool of operating profits. The margins are there for China to squeeze once their manufacturing capability catches up - and it’s catching up very quickly.
The other half is that, at these prices, the manufacturing doesn’t have to be competitive.
They can use a less advanced dram fab process, sell it for less than what Micron/SK/Samsung are charging and still make ends meet.
Maybe it’s higher voltage and slower. But again, at this point, people will take it.
It isn’t.
All it’s competitors also increased.
919,00€ for OLED 1TB model in Germany.
I have no hopes for Steam Machine price now…
Unfortunately, given the current economy, its not suprising. With how much prices have risen, the old pricing competed with and often beat out even used desktops.
I will never buy a new system again.
It’ll be a few years of pain, but once the bubble pops, we can start to return to normalcy. Take good care of the hardware you have in the meantime.
I don’t want to crush people’s optimism (I’m also envious of your viewpoint), but what makes you think any of this will pop and return to normalcy?
Making cheap RAM is possible, it was done before. Now there’s huge demand. Surely some companies will come in and fill that demand. That’s the whole point of capitalism.
Because none of this is profitable and has no plans to be profitable.
It only isn’t profitable yet, because it’s not good enough to replace most jobs yet. It will go from being unprofitable to very profitable, very quickly once it hits a certain point and they can stop relying on human labor entirely.
Or at least that’s the plan.
There is no “yet”. There is no plan. It well never be that good, and they know it. This is the big lie they’re feeding everyone to drive up stock prices. Its a false dawn. Its the same lie Elon has been peddling about level 5 autonomy for 10+ years.
We’re in this place because AI companies are buying up all the supply, and in order to do that, they have to pay higher than market rates to buy what’s left of the supply available. That means their break-even point is now higher than it would be in a rational economy, and they’re already not profitable. That’s a bubble. It doesn’t matter if it’s tulip bulbs, a business with “dot com” on the end of its name, or a home that no one lives in; if you’re expecting to make money off of the next greater fool, it will pop.
But let’s say it doesn’t. The other way to meet the supply-demand curve and make money off of consumers like you and I who want to buy hardware at prices that we can afford is to increase production so that there’s more supply. If this is the new normal (it’s not), the component producers can increase their manufacturing capacity, and in a handful of years (pessimistically about a decade to build those sorts of factories, which would be brutal if true), they’ll have enough throughput to meet everyone’s demand. And I don’t think those producers are looking to scale up because they also don’t believe this is the new normal. If they believed that, then they’re leaving future profits on the table by not scaling up production to meet demand.
And I don’t think those producers are looking to scale up because they also don’t believe this is the new normal. If they believed that, then they’re leaving future profits on the table by not scaling up production to meet demand.
They are so wrong, though.
$1130 CAD for the 512gb model.
I built my gaming desktop for that price and it has a 4070 super.
Next word generating companies have literally made personal computing unaffordable for the next decade (at least).
have literally made personal computing unaffordable
…not if you buy our XBOX GAME CLOUD!!! and WINDOWS 365!!! rent forever and own nothing! the future is looking bright 🤑 /s
Cold day in hell i ever subscribe to that shit.
Yup. I built my rig when it was just barely affordable and plan to maintain it for many years. It works just fine for the titles I play.
I mainly feel for the enthusiasts and the community and economy they built. Most people aren’t interested in tech they can never hope to reasonably afford. Gone are the times of a new rig every 3-4 years. Gone is the excitement.
unaffordable for the next decade
If you’re talking RAM prices, those are expected to come down in early 2028, so 18-ish months.
So how are they expected to come down? If new capacity becomes available the ai companies would gobble it up again.
Just ad infinitum? If so, the most profitable venture for any human being to be involved in right now would be RAM production. All of those producers would be expanding, because there would be infinite demand. No, these purchases are capex costs; the kind that they have to do once or every so many years. And the only way it happens every so many years is if the companies currently buying these things survive long enough to replace those parts when they reach their end of life.
Because there are some signs the bubble might be about to burst. Some of the purchase orders have either been rescinded or downsized, and - ironically - thanks to capitalism AI is becoming unaffordable for some businesses. As popularity increases, AI companies are raising prices and this is leading to human labour once again becoming cheaper than just vibe coding everything.
Sources:
Oof I can’t recommend a new one to anyone at that price. Fortunately there’s still a lot of used ones around where I live, but that’s a big old yikes.
I guess I’m not buying the steam machine. I guess buying technology is an investment now.
When the US “banned” the sale of routers, I went out and bought one I didn’t need as a backup. Not so much an investment as it is an insurance policy against technofascism.
Of course it did.
Raising prices that much with no hardware upgrade? I guess I won’t be buying a Steam Deck anymore. May as well get a ROG Ally or Logitech Cloud for that price.
how does a logitech g cloud even compare to a steam deck?
I am making a point
Depends on when precisely you’re in the market for a handheld, because if Valve is raising their prices, everyone will be eventually.
Yeah but still a Steam Deck isn’t worth over $700 when there are handhelds with better specs around that price already
I guess I’m never upgrading my Steam Deck to oled
There’s always decksight: https://www.crowdsupply.com/shade-technik/decksight
Holy shit, 1080p resolution AND lower power draw is crazy. I’m definetly doing this if I damage my lcd
This timeline sucks.
