You’ve been able to make a low powered Linux machine whenever you wanted to. The Steam machine didn’t change anything.

Is needing less power a plus when talking about a gaming pc? The steam machine uses less power than the competition because they’ve kneecapped the SoC with power draw limits, limiting performance.

That’s not true. I wanted a “next gen” since about 2 years into the current gen when it was clear that the hardware wasn’t good enough to keep up with pc and game tech.

Not surprising, this has been the case since the PS4 and XB1 era launched. Both Sony and MS stopped selling below cost because it just destroyed their financials.

There is a big enough PlayStation hardcore fan base that will buy whatever they put out at whatever price they ask for them to not have to even worry about price.

It doesn’t really matter how much profit they’re making on it, it’s a bad deal because every other comparable low end pc is upgradable whereas the steam machine isn’t.

There’s just no reason for a locked-hardware low-end device like the steam machine to exist. Why would anyone want a non-upgradable PC, when the reason people play on PC is for the upgradability?

The hardware is bad. It’s a power throttled bottom of the barrel GPU and CPU. It’s a 1080p30fps machine for anything other than indies, and for most AAA gaming it will need the atrocious FSR to even get to that.

It’s not upgradable either, so it’s not like you can just swap out the GPU or CPU for a better one later.

For a machine that’s targeting the living room, where most people who might consider buying this would be wanting to use it on a big 4K TV, they’ve made the worst possible performing machine for that use case.

I’m not sure how much of a console gamer you are, or how much you keep an eye on game prices, but almost every sale on steam for games that are on consoles happens on Xbox and PlayStation too. I know because I often have to choose between buying on Xbox or Steam when there’s a sale, and the Xbox version with play anywhere is the same price as the steam one so I usually buy the Xbox one.

Of course I’m talking about looks, as that is literally the only thing people take issue about with this car.

The Steam frame is going to be expensive. They don’t have the luxury of scale giving them some pricing relief, and as the Steam machine shows, they’re clearly not too concerned about making their products good value, affordable, or competitively priced.

I’d say the frame will be USD$1500+, at a conservative floor for the price.

The steam machine from valve is just a small form factor junk box.

Got nothing to do with being close minded lol. You’re saying “read about the downsides of going digital” and I’m saying I don’t need to because I already know them and accept them.

I don’t need to read anything this topic because I’m well aware of the downsides and repercussions of what I’m doing. The benefits outweigh them, like I said.

It’s not just the models that make the big players great, it’s the proprietary tools to use those models. Claude code, codex, seedance, etc are what everyone wants and what are so groundbreaking, not the LLM that they use.

Making RAM isn’t like making a shirt or a suitcase v it’s an extremely specialised and extremely expensive business, and this should be apparent given there are literally only 3 manufacturers in the world.

Making ram is incredibly hard and expensive, that’s why there are only 3 companies in the entire world that do it. For a new company to attempt to do it now, they’d have to outlay tens/hundreds of billions of dollars and a decade before they see a cent of revenue.

Their birth rate is “In collapse” because they already have a gigantic population that is too big.

There is literally zero incentive for companies to make ram and sell it cheap. The market is used to current prices, and by 2030 current prices will be looked at as cheap.

People that think there’s going to be an AI crash are in for a rough future. The genie is out of its bottle and it’s never going back in.

You may as well be saying that there’s going to be an EV crash.

I have a work issued Lenovo Thinkpad P14S Gen6 AMD with a Ryzen 9 AI, 2TB nvme, and 64GB of GDDR5 RAM. It cost $2600 last October.

Went to buy more of them for other devs last week as their Dells are just hot garbage and are being refunded, who wants to guess what the price of the exact same machine though Lenovo directly again is now?

$6800.

Absolutely insane.

Apple haven’t designed a radically different looking product, or one that bad looking, for decades. Jonny Ive didn’t design that atrocity. He designed the interior, and that shows.

I don’t need to read anything. I understand the benefits and also the drawbacks of digital licenses.

To me, and to most people, the benefits - instant access, all games accessible without getting off your lounge, no possibility of losing/breaking discs, home console/family sharing, no “sold out” chance, among others - outweigh being able to re-sell and lend to people.

These days even the physical prices are not much cheaper than digital, and digital copies go on much better sales that are more available.