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 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.
Personally, I would be interested in a different type of Steam Machine: A shrouded motherboard as a sort of LEGO base, into which you place modular blocks or cartridges that contain the PSU, CPU, USB, RAM, Wi-Fi, audio, drives, and graphics. Each block can have rails, to provide connections for power and signals, so that users don’t need to futz around with wires. Just plonk a brick down onto the rails below it, and you are good for that part.
Would it actually work from an engineering perspective? No idea. All I know is that I would replace parts of my PC more often, if I didn’t have to worry about screwing up in some fashion.
Look at the price of Xbox series X SSD expansion vs PS5 and see if that’s what you really want. $150 for 1TB with Xbox or 2TB for the same price or less for PS5? 1TB NVMe is well under $100 right now.
This. Components would be overpriced and proprietary. Nobody wants that.
Building and upgrading a computer really isn’t that difficult. All the parts only fit in one spot. Getting compatible parts can be tricky if you don’t know what you’re looking for…but this problem could strike this idea, too, because there would certainly need to be different generation mainboards whenever CPU sockets or chipsets or memory speed or really anything else on the mainboard comes around.
So such a solution would likely lead to less choice and more proprietary vendor-locked garbage. Just now solely on the hardware side.
But wait…what games are compatible with this system? What games will run well?
This is something Valve has done really well…they built a benchmark system. This is the problem that’s been plagueing PC, imo. AAA games get built for bleeding edge tech, necessitating upgrades…while the steamdeck sets a bar that developers have to be playable on in order to tap that entire market. Could the game run better on better systems? Sure, probably. But it needs to be at least playable on steamdeck.
What I’m trying to say is we should all just standardize on PlayStation. Cheers.
Monopolies are good for innovation /s
(Bell Labs being probably the only notable exception)