Tariffs, component volatility, and Valve’s tolerance for losses all lead to uncertainty.
The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
The steam deck provides at least a compelling reason and it didn’t sell all that great. This is just pissing money away on shitty hardware.
Console buyers are not going to be pulled away from their eco systems and PC builders are going to know better. At best they’re going to get a sliver of the pre built market and they will quickly adjust while the box sku will remain largely untouched.
I’m looking for small cheap boxes to put in other rooms for the family and to replace consoles and it’s a non starter for me. Who is actually going to purchase this thing?
You could buy a refurbished laptop, or spend a few extra bucks and get twice the GPU 🤷♂️ and a machine with proper RAM and vRAM.
I’m working on an ~$800-900 build for my little cousin with a Ryzen 7600X and a Radeon 7600 in an mATX mini-tower. According to the specs I’ve read, this is at or above the Steam Machine in both processing and graphics power.
Socket AM5 motherboards are weirdly expensive in the ITX form factor; I bought an ITX AM4 motherboard for like $100 a few years ago, but like, Asrock isn’t selling a B650M-ITX Pro RS, not in this hemisphere anyway. That and non-stupid ITX cases are difficult to find. A lot of the “it’s a PC tower, but ITX size” like the Meshify Nano are being discontinued. So motherboard manufacturers think the ITX market is going for extreme high end, as if we need lots of PCIe lanes on motherboards that only fit one slot, and case manufacturers don’t think heat sinks exist.
The success of the Steam Deck clearly proves how many pc users prefer a ready to go console-like experience, over high performance. Anything under 850 will sell like crazy. And considering that this is a Linux pc, i saw this as an absolute win. 2026 could really be the year of Linux.
PC builders aren’t interested in prebuilts. If this provides 90% of the experience of a prebuilt at 50% of the price, it makes sense. We don’t know the actual percentages yet but you get the idea hopefully.
My point was that many prebuilts are so shit, that it’s easy to make a comparatively good product. I mean ffs some of them don’t even run their CPUs and RAM at advertised speeds.
Laptops are a completely different breed that this thing isn’t gonna compete with, not at 800 bucks, not at 200.
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Doubt it.
The steam deck provides at least a compelling reason and it didn’t sell all that great. This is just pissing money away on shitty hardware.
Console buyers are not going to be pulled away from their eco systems and PC builders are going to know better. At best they’re going to get a sliver of the pre built market and they will quickly adjust while the box sku will remain largely untouched.
I’m looking for small cheap boxes to put in other rooms for the family and to replace consoles and it’s a non starter for me. Who is actually going to purchase this thing?
You could buy a refurbished laptop, or spend a few extra bucks and get twice the GPU 🤷♂️ and a machine with proper RAM and vRAM.
Price out a build that will compete with this and not require an ATX tower.
I’m working on an ~$800-900 build for my little cousin with a Ryzen 7600X and a Radeon 7600 in an mATX mini-tower. According to the specs I’ve read, this is at or above the Steam Machine in both processing and graphics power.
Socket AM5 motherboards are weirdly expensive in the ITX form factor; I bought an ITX AM4 motherboard for like $100 a few years ago, but like, Asrock isn’t selling a B650M-ITX Pro RS, not in this hemisphere anyway. That and non-stupid ITX cases are difficult to find. A lot of the “it’s a PC tower, but ITX size” like the Meshify Nano are being discontinued. So motherboard manufacturers think the ITX market is going for extreme high end, as if we need lots of PCIe lanes on motherboards that only fit one slot, and case manufacturers don’t think heat sinks exist.
Have you seen a PS5? ATX is what people already do at this price point.
ITX isn’t the pull here.
The success of the Steam Deck clearly proves how many pc users prefer a ready to go console-like experience, over high performance. Anything under 850 will sell like crazy. And considering that this is a Linux pc, i saw this as an absolute win. 2026 could really be the year of Linux.
PC builders aren’t interested in prebuilts. If this provides 90% of the experience of a prebuilt at 50% of the price, it makes sense. We don’t know the actual percentages yet but you get the idea hopefully.
My point was that many prebuilts are so shit, that it’s easy to make a comparatively good product. I mean ffs some of them don’t even run their CPUs and RAM at advertised speeds.
Laptops are a completely different breed that this thing isn’t gonna compete with, not at 800 bucks, not at 200.