I've gone through my own cycle of this as a musician. Early in my music experience I was always obsessed with originality, and wouldn't learn a lot of existing pieces. At the stage I'm at now, I find great value in learning great songs and understanding why they work.
There is a lot of great work out there and if you are unwilling to be derivative in anyway, you'll intentionally avoid using and finding great things that others have discovered.
I think this put this all in perspective for me. If Microsoft came out with this exact hardware (with Windows but still open and you could load SteamOS on it), at this price point, people mock Microsoft to death about how this product is a joke.
It’s called the Xbox and the reason it wasn’t at this price point is that Microsoft has the capital power to subsidize the cost at risk of the Xbox division not being profitable. Valve doesn’t have such freedoms on hardware it seems.
The XSX costs 43% less than the cheapest Steam Machine, even though it has twice the SSD and includes a controller. Microsoft isn't subsidizing it that far.
That’s a Nth generation device that has a built out hardware pipeline. I assure you that Microsoft still subsidizes the devices and has lowered the cost on later models through hardware supply chain build out agreements.
What are you trying to prove? That Microsoft has hardware pricing magic?
The PS5 Pro has 16 GB unified memory, the Steam Machine is 16GB + 8GB. That'll be where some of the price difference comes from. But most likely comes from Sony locking in long term contracts before price insanity.
Unified memory is a lot more flexible and efficient though. You don't have to have assets loaded in RAM and also VRAM for the CPU/GPU to use them. Don't forget about how much more RAM a general purpose OS like Steam OS can consume versus a gaming specific OS too. The PS5 Pro also has an extra 2GB of DDR5 system RAM too.
My old Ryzen 3700X gaming PC has 16GB of RAM and 8GB of VRAM (RTX 2070 Super) and there isn't any game that runs better on it than my Xbox Series X. And the GPU in the Steam Machine is slightly worse than an RTX 2070 Super.
> You don't have to have assets loaded in RAM and also VRAM for the CPU/GPU to use them.
You typically don't want to do this anyway in games. You're probably doing something wrong if you're reading textures/meshes on both the CPU and GPU.
> Don't forget about how much more RAM a general purpose OS like Steam OS can consume versus a gaming specific OS too.
SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode. That's just taking up some disk space while you play games.
>SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode.
I think it's fair for some of us to consider the resource usage of a core feature and not really accept "just don't use desktop mode" as a viable suggestion. Especially if half the pitch is "it's a mobile PC." You can't use many of the features it's capable of in gaming mode.
It's not "don't use desktop mode", it's "switch back to gaming mode before playing a game".
On any 16GB machine you're going to want to close your any ram heavy apps like browsers before starting a game. Switching to gaming mode is an easy way to do that.
If you're playing games only in desktop mode then you're throwing away most of the benefits of SteamOS. You could install Steam on any Linux distro and have the same experience.
Gaming mode skips running the entire desktop environment and runs games in a minimal environment. KDE is fairly lightweight already but come on, how can it compete with something that just displays one window filling the whole screen?
Different value props. The target audience for this already has an extensive Steam catalogue. To buy a PS5 Pro is going to require re-buying all of your games for it.
Also, you can build a decent PC for $1049, but getting it into a decent form/noise factor is going to ratchet that price up. Add in the proprietary CEC stuff that Valve has done for it and it's not as terrible as it seems.
Console stores also have sales. Often with pretty huge discounts. I just bought a bunch of games on Xbox in the 1-5 dollar range. I see similar sales on PS5 all the time.
Honestly, these days, Steam, PS and Xbox game sales prices are pretty much in the same level now. Ten years ago it was very different. Recently I was thinking whether to buy Resident Evil 4 on Steam or on PS (had the same price 9,99€). Got it on Steam in the end. Though, Steam still wins on regional pricing as they support more local currencies.
Only the Nintendo store have games priced usually a bit higher.
A slow gaming PC that is small and can turn on my TV is still... a slow gaming PC. And one of the main PC benefits, upgradeability is non-existent for the parts that matter (e.g. GPU, VRAM, etc).
I'm still gaming on a 980. I have never been chasing pixel perfection or the latest and greatest.
I would say I am the exception, but hardware survey says otherwise. There are a lot of people for whom the Steam Machine would be at worst a sidegrade.
I'm actually firmly in the console (XSX in my case) bracket for my gaming. I want it to just work without any fuss, and for way under $1000.
The main benefits to the PC gaming space (upgradability of components, higher than console performance, compatible with a diverse ecosystem) are all worse on the Steam Machine than basically any other gaming PC. And running Windows games on Linux is definitely more fuss for many/most games.
The Steam Machine is extremely small and supports HDMI-CEC. Other than that, it doesn't have a lot going for it, and it is priced at quite the premium. That is a questionable value prop for many.
> To buy a PS5 Pro is going to require re-buying all of your games for it
Why would I re-buy all the games I own?! The vast majority of people one-and-done games and movies. There are a handful they go back to, and that's it.
CHILDREN replay games cycling through them ad-infimum because their entire concept of time is like 3x less than we've been waiting for the next GTA.
And they don't have money! Adults are the majority of the market now.
Any other behavior from adults, who are seriously time constrained, is niche. And that's fine if someone wants to spend their adult time on earth replaying games, but let's be honest. It's niche.
* Not all PS4 games can run on PS5. Granted, it's only a few edge cases. But you still need to pay the PS4>PS5 upgrade if you want to avoid bottlenecks.
* PS3 games and the like require a 150+$ yearly subscription, and it's streaming for many of them. No thanks.
* No PS2/PSP/Vita compatibility, heck no emulation at all.
Exactly. That is just more about the ecosystem you are already in. I've been buying most games digitally since Xbox 360, and they all still run on my XSX. The same would be true if I had been in the Playstation ecosystem.
Well, and you pay 120$/year for the privilege to play games online on that PS5. That is one of the reasons SONY can subsidize the PS5 unit price and sell under cost. Valve is not in that position, because people would buy it as office PC replacement.
Also a PS5 only runs PS5 games which Sony gets a cut of whenever you purchase one.
With this thing you could buy it and then install your favorite Linux distro on it and never give Valve another dime. If they ate the cost, businesses would buy them up as the best value for the compute and they're not buying Steam games.
Yes, but we are in the unique situation that we saw actually increasing prices for RAM and storage over time due to AI craze. You (or me) have no idea what Sony's markup on consoles is right now.
I haven't heard of any others, and your comment said 'supercomputers'.
Not to mention that the NSCA was just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it would prove useful when it came to the PS2,[0] and their setup never worked reliably.[1] The PS3 had several supercomputers made independently.[1][2][3]
and the fears that Saddam Hussein was going to buy a bunch of PS2s because the cpu was SO POWERFUL they would be used for missile guidance systems or something
This more a dig at Sony than a reason Valve can’t also sell their hardware as a loss leader. They are massively profitable from their cut of Steam sales anyway. And part of PS Plus is a catalog of games and monthly games, similar to Gamepass. Valve could easily have a profitable subscription model for games or services if they wanted to.
Does Valve take a cut of software sales on Steam? If so, why do we expect Sony to sell its consoles at a loss, while not holding the same expectation for Valve?
Isn’t it just a mid-range PC for ~$1,100? Why would someone buy that just to use it like a regular PC and not use Steam? That just seems strange. I’m sure there are also many PS5 owners that bought the console but only got one or two games before the console collected dust.
Piracy and alternative storefronts don't exist on PS5. I could buy a steam machine and then exclusively buy my games from EA. They're also not charging you for the multiplayer access
That article is from 8 months after it released. Notably it doesn't count the Digital Edition, but I doubt it also got sold at a loss for that much longer.
I would guess that users of the Steam machine would mostly be as locked-in to Steam purchases as PS5 users are to PS Store purchases.
I stopped PC gaming about a decade ago and my current daily driver is a Macbook. I periodically play games on my a PS5 or XBOX, but there are a ton of great games on my Steam wishlist.
I feel like I'm the exact target market for this (although I'm not going to buy at this price point at this time). I don't want to bother with Windows and would love a 'console' allowing me to play most Steam games without a lot of hassle.
And it is the first time in history where storage and RAM cost double or triple what it cost 6 months ago. So unknown if Sony makes a profit from todays sales.
Sony is selling off old stocks at old future prices. They've already started hiking the price up - it's unlikely they'll eat the loss on hardware here either.
Right, but it’s a PS5, not a PC - you’re paying less for the privilege of letting Sony 100% control what you use the device for, including not being able to play your own games that you’ve paid for. Try doing that on a PC. Try checking your email on your PS5, or steaming the media of your choice.
Even if you only used your Steam Machine to play Steam games it's still probably a better deal. Multiplayer and cloud saves are free so you don't need something like PlayStation Plus. Games are generally cheaper and Steam sales make them even cheaper. You also don't lose access to older games if you get a better system.
> You also don't lose access to older games if you get a better system.
To be fair, all the latest generation consoles are near 100% backwards compatible with their respective last gen. This has historically been more tricky due to architecture changes but it seems like all consoles have converged into more or less bog-standard prebuilt computers so it's less of an ask.
But still, I trust my Steam library to last longer than anything I've bought digitally on consoles.
I also played through all the Dragon Age games on PC recently! Origins needs a small patch to run on a 64-bit machine and it doesn't scale very well on a 4k monitor without 3rd party software but other than that it's a great show of backwards compatibility.
> the best one, Veilguard
I assume that's sarcasm or you're the first person I've heard to say that :)
Actually the reason I finally played the series is because my buddy worked on Veilguard. I'll give them credit for assembling something as cohesive as it is considering it went from a single player game to a multiplayer game and back to a single player game during development.
You missed the point. If all I did was make phone calls on a $100 flip phone why would someone saying "oh but the $1000 iPhone can do so much more!" matter to me.
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?"
I know what the Steam Machine is, I'm saying the compromise of the PlayStation being cheaper isn't a compromise because I simply don't care that my game console isn't a PC. I have a PC, and I don't want one connected to my TV anyway. I don't think I'm unusual in that regard and the market of people who want to check their email on their TV is pretty small!
> For reference, the PS5 Pro has more than twice the number GPU CUs, an 8-core CPU, a 2TB SSD, a controller, and costs $899.
PS5 Pro had a launch price of $700, which already felt steep. How is $900 not even worse value? Even if it's "better" than the Steam Machine, let's not pretend that it's actually a good value for the hardware.
It is already outdated I think? 8GB of VRAM, and CPU and mobile GPU from 3+ years ago. Nobody would build a gaming PC right now with a GPU that anemic and 8GB of VRAM.
And yet my steam deck still plays everything I throw at it. Could I find a Crysis-type game that was basically designed as a GPU torture device that it would struggle with? Obviously. Is there a resolution difference? Yes. But there are a lot of games coming out only asking for moderate specs.
So a tiny tiny tiny amount of games, with the added fun that older games might just not be available, OR cost a whole bunch because they're collector items.
People love talking about console exclusives, but every game from before 2013 is basically a PC exclusive.
The irony there is that the Steam Machine can't actually run the full Steam library since most games aren't made for Linux. Most run on it via Proton, many even run well, but it is very far from "all the games play without issues".
Can you imagine if the PlayStation Store sold games on the PS5 that you couldn't play there because they were actually Windows games?
There's no game worth installing a rootkit for. The market is far more diverse and interesting than the handful of popular AAA titles , most of which are just shooters
There is a certain group of gamers who care about all of those games, but there is a not insignificant group who doesn't at all. So while it's not a non issue, it's not a show stopper that you can't play online shooter games. And that really is the only genre of game that won't work. Everything else has been flawless on linux.
Can I serve my media library off of my NAS with the PS5? I am legit asking because I just got on the list hoping to use this thing as my home entertainment system
Based on the disclosed financials by SpaceX, they have made $48B in revenue since 2023 with a cumulative loss of -$41.3B.
And yet, based on stock price and market cap, they are worth about as much as Microsoft. Microsoft generated $80B of revenue and $31B in profits...per quarter last year. SpaceX will never, ever, generate $124B+ in annual profits.
Until the alians realize this and throw the drugs in the harbor, leading the a US vs alians war to open them up for free markets access. Not sure this can actually realize their ambition.
What about the compute deals? $3.1B a month for half their compute? Elon built $6B of rev in 122 days. What can he do now that he's got a $85B war chest of cash?
xAI was retardedly late to the party. When Elon Musk founded xAI in July 2023, competitors had already spent years buying up massive silicon footprints and locking down cloud partnerships.
OpenAI had a 3 year lead, anthropic 2.5 years, and google was building TPU's since 2015... what are you talking about?
First, many more people then just them buy these things and have ramped up their spending over the last 2 years.
And others if they were earlier, the explosion and demand of investment increased exponentially over the last 2 years, as we can see in the profit margins of the memory companies for example.
My claim was not that they were the first ever, but that Musk mobilized a huge amount of resources fairly quickly in a time where prices were exploding and before many others.
Early enough that compared to now he got a ok price and he can rent it more expensive then he bought it.
I'm not saying its not a reasonable business, but we are not asking 'can it be a business', we are asking can it be one of the most insane companies in world history. The suppliers have realized whats going on and they are racking in insane profit.
That's why all the Musk fans have realized that they need to scream 'Terafab'. But that is a fanciful concept and unprecedented in history of semiconductors.
>we are asking can it be one of the most insane companies in world history.
"So we went from, he just got lucky cause he got in early", to, "okay, he wasn't early he was just really fast", to, "the suppliers now see he's making a ton of money so they are going to raise prices" to, "terafab is impossible", QED?
You seem to misunderstand how tier 1 capital allocation actually works. You don't get fucked by your suppliers when you are adding $B's to their bottom line. XaI never "Stopped" purchasing GPU's in 2023. They signed multi-year long deals for as much hardware as nvidia, supermicro, dell and micron/skhynix can provide. They are the last to get squeezed. They never stopped adding on to Collosus 2, and they are actively building collosus 3.
Lastly, nothing is "Fanciful" about terafab. ASML makes the machines, Intel provides the cleanroom tech, and 14a pipeline... these are known variables that need to be tackled. Tesla and SpaceX are world renowned, high throughput manufacturing facilities with the ability to make lines more profitable than their competitors. .. no one is claiming he's building a TSMC-style silicon foundry. They are building a massive compute fabrication/clustering footprint. It is a formalized $55B industrial plan filed in Texas, backed by a hard partnerships.
They have quite short cancellation notices and there is a question why do you need to rent it if you are an ai company? How is it grok not running the world using that compute.. And possible cancellation will erase a large income stream, think when gpus get old or sooner when Google does not need it anymore.
an RTX 3090 or older Quadro/Tesla enterprise cards are still selling/ renting... 5 year depreciation is only for tax purposes.
Anthropic is not building their own datacenters... They are mainly giving equity for colocation with AWS. I cant find one example of them ground breaking on anything... Can you give me a source?
yeah, and power is not availabe at capacity until late 2029? They haven't even signed anything, the 'deal' is in principle and BP has been actively trying to challenge it because they want the same power for a hydrogen facility.
So, to circle back to my original point, Anthropic has not broken ground on actively building any datacenters.
The have customers actually willing to use and pay for their service.
In a world where even Microsoft is needing to use AWS for capacity beyond Azure, xAI's utilization of their data centers has been so low that they are renting them out to competitors instead.
Nobody wants Grok. If you aren't using GPT-5 or Claude, you are probably using an open Chinese model like Qwen hosted by some provider.
I would expect Cursor to be forced to use the Grok Code models in short order. We'll see how people feel about "Mecha Hitler" writing their code.
1. Remove the few pre-installed apps except the HDMI inputs you want.
2. Then disconnect wifi.
As long as the device you turn on does HDMI-CEC (which almost everything other than a PC does) it will automatically switch to the input that your device is connected to. If it doesn't, you just have to click on the input you want to switch to.
> I would guess most Roku users aren't using a box these days.
Sure I guess. But those devices objectively suck. the CPU and storage in "smart TVs" are so underpowered that using streaming apps on them is painfully sluggish.
For comparison, I've used the "Chromecast with Google TV" (a $50ish at its release 4k streaming stick that uses the 'Google TV', fka 'Android TV' platform) and a Sony TV on the same platform, released the same year. The Sony UI is a lot more sluggish than the Google stick device. Also tested running an SNES emulator. The Google device can easily do it, the Sony TV can't keep up even on a basic game like Super Mario World.
And then of course, on the other end of the spectrum, the Apple TV exists, which specs-wise can easily play 3D racing games at a fine framerate.
Agreed. I currently have a “Roku TV” that is hooked up to another Roku device, because the one built into it is so slow and outdated as to be almost unusable. The $29 (on sale) Roku stick I hooked up to it works fine. Getting a built-in Roku IMHO is a false economy, the built-in thing will almost certainly go to crap before the TV itself does.
Maybe it is just the devices I have, but I've had the higher end 4K-capable Roku boxes before I eventually got all Roku TVs. I would say the experience with my Roku TVs (TCL, Phillips, and Sharp) has been the best. Nothing slow about them.
I don't try to do anything like run a console emulator on them though. Just watching streaming channels and YouTube TV.
I wish I could come back and ask you how they perform after a couple more years of "software updates" from the app providers. Considering, too, that they will also be vibe-coding them from here on out.
IDK about the specs on yours, but even things like bloated sizes of apps themselves on disk can become a problem. What happens when the OS and the apps inevitably go up in size such that the 8GB or whatever TCL has decided to give you cannot hold the OS, Netflix, Disney+, and HBO at the same time? They don't just let you stay on old versions anymore, either.
I have a 10 year old 4k Roku TV that works a good as new. The Roku app API is severely limited. The upside of that is that it discourages webdev bloat.
Interesting. Honestly I had never considered that angle. Given that they really ought not to need anything but simple navigation of lists and grids to build a streaming app that is actually usable and fast, not whatever the Youtube App (330MB) and Netflix (183MB) are wasting my phone's space on... now I'm wondering if this forced parsimony imposed on the developers could be a reason to give Roku a try again. I admit it's been over a decade since I used a Roku regularly.
With Roku built in as well as whatever ad pipeline(s) the TV manufacturer wants. These days my AppleTV is allowed to talk to the internet. My television is not.
I have a Samsung TV that I intentionally didn’t connect to the Internet for that reason. I occasionally get an annoying pop-up randomly, encouraging me to connect it to Wi-Fi.
> Especially because you can get TVs with Roku built-in.
Except in that case don't you have to give the TVs themselves Internet access? Do you trust any TV with such access nowadays given all the tomfoolery with surveillance that most OEMs do?
Especially because you can get TVs with Roku built-in.
I believe there are TVs that come with AppleTV built-in. I'm not in the market, so I haven't looked, but I suspect they're not the bargain basement Wal-Mart sets.
Eh those TVs are a dubious value proposition. I grabbed one and wound up returning it because it won't even let you use the TV as a damned TV without connecting it to the internet and creating a roku account so they can track you.
My Roku TV (that hasn't been turned on in years, but was left plugged in for years...) literally tries to reach out every minute to home servers. Before u plugging it, I had blocked it's DNS, and was blown away at how frequently it tries to phone home. Easily the noisiest device on my home network.
PG is clearly confusing "capturing" a billion dollars for "earning" a billion dollars. Becoming a billionare is working the system so that the wealth generated by something people love (Amazon) is mostly captured by a select group of people (Jeff Bezos) and not the workers who are actually earning the company the value (fulfilling and delivering the packages).
The system set up by the company is what earns the company value and creates it for others. Individual workers implement critical parts of that system, but the work of the workers does not on its own create the value. AOC and PG are both a bit obtuse about this.
"Company" is doing some very heavy lifting in how you are using it. The "company" in that sense does not include any worker who isn't a meaningful equity participant. In Amazon's case, or Telsa/SpaceX's case, the "company" is a single founder and his cronnies.
But as for `the work of the workers does not on its own create the value`... I just don't see how that isn't completely incorrect. It is literally the only part that is at the core of the value creation.
How much value would be created by Amazon tomorrow if every fulfillment worker and driver didn't show up? Basically none. But Jeff Bezos could die of a heart attack tomorrow and it wouldn't stop a single dollar of value creation.
We really don't appreciate the contributions of workers enough in this country. Whether it is the medical assistant at the doctor's office, the person who makes your burrito, delivers the Amazon diaper's order, or even check you out at the store. If people stop showing up to work, this all falls apart. It won't matter how much capital you have if you have no workers.
Concretely, the company is not a single founder and his cronies. The company is a pile of paperwork (aka contracts) that dictate the relationships between (thousands of) people who are all involved in the enterprise, from factory workers and entry-level coders to investors. It is that pile of paper and the relationships it encodes that creates an output that is larger than the sum of its parts.
You can worry about whether the split of return is correct, but arguing that the pile of paperwork is valueless or somehow nonexistent is silly. Value flowing to investors is a consequence of how that pile of paperwork is set up and what is on the papers, nothing more or less.
The sad reality is that it doesn't really matter which system you try to do (capitalism, communism, monarchy, etc), it is almost always the powerful exploiting the less powerful.
China probably has the most successful communist government ever (in large part by selectively adopting capitalism) but it isn't like the conditions for their workers are better than in the U.S. or Europe.
All this talk of "late-stage capitalism" seems to miss the mark. It is the rise of many forms of authoritarianism that is the leading cause of disregard for the needs of every day working peoples.
There is a lot of great work out there and if you are unwilling to be derivative in anyway, you'll intentionally avoid using and finding great things that others have discovered.
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