I never said $800 would be selling at a loss, in fact I said that there’s a good possibility that they can sell it cheaper than 800 and still make a profit because they buy things in bulk. You were the first one who even mentioned it being profitable for them selling at a loss:

They could totally make money selling it at a loss.

Which is completely false, if they sold at a loss by definition they would lose money on each sale, and because it’s an open platform people would just buy the cheap hardware to be used for any project which would make Valve bleed money like Sony did with their PS3 until they closed the system.

And then we could make money having people riding her. If you’re going to start a hypothetical scenario of Valve still being able to make money selling at a loss you can’t be angry that people are replying on the basis your premise is true.

If they’re sold at a loss, by definition they have to be cheaper than anything sold at a gain with the same performance.

I hold a very similar view, I usually express it like so:

If you were to develop a simulation of a universe you would have to make some concession to be able to run such a large simulation:

• You would have to limit causality, since the communication from one part of the cluster to the next would not be instantaneous you would need to limit the speed at which those communications can happen, that way you guarantee that one part of your cluster can’t interfere with another, think of it like a loading screen.
• Speaking of loading screens, you could make the vast majority of the thing empty, that would limit stuff going over from one part to another.
• You could gain lots of performance by only simulating the micro stuff when required, so an electron could be a wave of possibilities until they need to be somewhere, think of it in the same manner as current games don’t draw what’s not on screen.

I don’t think so, I think a normal user would pause when the system asks him to type “Yes, do as I say” as that is clearly a sign that you’re about to shoot yourself in the foot.

If it’s sold at a loss like a console it would beat the price/performance of any other x86 chip on the market, which is why they can’t sell it at a loss, ergo my point.

No, it won’t. $800 will get you a machine that’s around 50% faster. Controller included.

Care to share a link to a PCPartPicker with that? Here’s a link on the same thread of someone building a similarly speck machine for 800 https://lemmy.world/comment/20649777 and that is without the controller. In case you haven’t noticed, RAM prices are a bit crazy at the moment.

It’s literally a laptop CPU with a laptop GPU.

It’s literally not, they custom developed it for the product, similar to the Steam Deck one, it is based on the architecture used on laptops, but so are Playstation and Xbox AFAIK.

Also not true. A 1k prebuilt is around 70% faster. Controller not included, though.

Can you provide a link to such a prebuilt? Here’s the first prebuilt I could find with similar specs, and it’s 1k https://periphio.com/gaming-pcs/firestorm-7600-prebuilt-amd-gaming-pc/

Sure, but that’s an argument in favour of it costing less.

Yes, that was my point, the top of what this should cost is the same as a prebuilt with similar specs since Valve buys stuff in bulk it should be cheaper than that.

Yeah, and the best selling console of the generation is $450 for the digital-only version.

And the other one is 700, your point is?

Stop this delusion. If this was an actual possibility, it would already be happening with the Steam Deck. Yes, I know you know someone who did it. I know someone who bought a Surface to put Linux on it. There’s dozens of us!

It didn’t happened with the Deck because it’s not sold at a loss, so it’s cheaper to assemble a similarly built PC for you. But I definitely saw several posts through the years recommending people just buy a Steam Deck as their machine in certain conditions. If the Steam Deck costed 300 I guarantee you people would be using it as their daily drivers or building clusters of them.

Only after they closed their system, which they did because they were losing money to every single enterprise in the world who wanted a cluster and PS3 were the cheapest option.

This is the thing I’m replying to, emphasis on the prebuilt.

Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000

For 1k you can get a 9600 9060XT 16gb system, which is waaaaaay more powerful, so this is quite an exaggeration.

But yeah, I don’t think the machine will cost the same as a prebuilt, but that’s the high end of the price range.

The answer I’m replying to suggested you can get a prebuilt with a 9600 for 1000, since they’re replying to my point that a prebuilt with similar spec is 1000.

No, they couldn’t, have you read about the PS3? They were a lot cheaper than building a similar system so several companies bought thousands to build clusters, I personally worked at a relatively small university that had a cluster made of dozens of PS3s, since each Playstation costed Sony around $200 my university on its own costed thousands to Sony, and I imagine every other university and some private companies did the same.

It’s a lot more than that, it’s:

• Knowing what parts to buy, I don’t think most average people can cite every piece in a desktop
• Selecting parts that are compatible, try plug-and-play an AMD CPU on an Intel MOBO.
• Selecting parts that fit the chassis you selected, unless you went with a full ATX that’s a concern.

Now that you bought the components:

• Knowing to ground yourself before doing anything, currently I’m getting static shocks daily where I live, if I didn’t know about this I could very easily fry a RAM by picking it up wrong.
• Cable management is not easy, most cheaper chassis don’t have enough or dedicated space for it.
• Correct amount of thermal paste is something lots of people get wrong.
• Some pieces require strength to lock in place, others break if you even look at them sideways.

Now that you’ve assembled everything:

• Installing OS
• Installing drivers
• Installing Steam
• Depending on your OS and controller of choice pairing controller and getting it to work could be difficult

I’m not saying that assembling a computer is hard, but is definitely far from plug-and-play, and not something I would recommend for someone without technical knowledge who just wants something to play games.

A prebuilt plug-and-play device? Can you share a link to that?

It was known beforehand and was fixed already by the time he released his video, he just happened to luck out and encounter it during the short spam it existed.

I disagree that he approached it as a complete idiot, he approached it as someone who knows what they’re doing, when he definitely doesn’t, and that was the issue. Anyone without technical know-how would have panicked at the system asking him to type “I know what I’m doing”, and anyone with enough technical know-how would have paused at that and read the message carefully and moped the fuck out. He had enough knowledge to think he knew what he was doing, but not enough to actually do, and the boldness to think he knew better.

That being said, I agree that there’s plenty of other stuff to bash him for, and that was not a great example, lots of people would have found themselves in that same situation, and I don’t think it’s unfair to say the fuck up there was not entirely on his part.

Yup, like I said, it depends on how prices will fluctuate, my guess is what the price would be if it was being sold now, if RAM increases they would have to compensate for it.

Yup, I love DIY, had tons of fun building my wife’s mini-itx gaming rig, my NAS and even my desktop (although it was the boring one of the three since it’s just standard). I love poking on my system, trying out stuff, etc. But I bought a Deck and my only mod was getting EmuDeck in it, it just works for what I want it to, and that’s worth a lot to me, it allows me to pour my time on stuff I want to be building and just game on my gaming boxes.

Let’s talk wages.

Absolutely agreed, if every company had wages at the level Valve does it would be very good.

Yeah, but to be fair that was a shitty thing the system did, anyone with experience would know not to do it, but honestly it should have never happened. On the other hand, Linus is a bit daft and lots of stuff blows over his head monumentally, in the same video where he said he would be building a Steam Machine he also couldn’t seem to grasp that this is just a computer and people would see it as a prevuilt. In short I don’t think he will acknowledge lots of the killer features in the Steam Machine just so he can claim his thing does the same. But at least it will be an interesting watch.

Facts people forget:

• Assembling your own Steam Machine with similar parts will cost around 800
• Even if you assembled it yourself you would be missing features, such as cec, wake by controller, sleep mid game, etc. LTT will try to build one, it will be interesting to see what they come up with, but I’m 90% it won’t have feature parity.
• There’s lots of engineering gone into this machine, they’re way more compact, less power hungry and more quiet than anything you can build yourself.
• Buying the same build as a prebuilt brings a premium and costs around 1000
• Valve purchases stuff in scale so they can diminish their margin and could potentially sell it cheaper than prebuilts, and possibly cheaper than building it yourself.
• Consoles are sold at a loss, and they recover it with games because the platform is closed.
• The Steam Machine is not closed, they can’t be sure they’re getting game purchases, because people might be buying this to be their work computer. So they have to price it as a PC, with margin on hardware, not promise of future returns.
• Price might fluctuate between now and announcement, RAM prices are going crazy nowadays.

With all of that being said, it seems to me it’s very likely it will be around 800 but less than 1000. For people saying you can build one for that price yourself, sure, go ahead, you’ll have a huge, power hungry loud box, without the same features and you would have saved only a small fraction of the value by having to assemble everything yourself.

Nope, but gaming was essentially non-existing. We had almost no native title, and wine while great was very hit or miss. I remember having to tweak a lot for each game, from the basic whine version to the DLLs installed, etc, usually going only by what was on WineHQ, or troubleshooting yourself on guesses. Eventually PlayOnLinux was created and we had a repository of a “stable” way to run a game, but it was still bad. Eventually some Indie games started releasing for Linux, and I swore off wine except for some very specific stuff. When Steam was released for Linux, it was a great time, and some native games came our way. And then Proton happen and while lots of us were a bit uncertain about it, it turned out to be great, and thanks to that we’re now in a state where the majority of games just work.

But back to your question, the general Linux experience outside of gaming (and other software compatibility) was not much different than today, with the exception of Xorg configurations, which I still to this day remember I don’t have to do anymore and immediately all other problems seem insignificant.