Echo Dot

I mean, I’ve been running Linux off it on a Pi for years without issue.

It’s a lot better than the practise of posting basically every news story because it tangentially involves a computer.

But it’s also a handheld console so that doesn’t really track.

An entry level gaming PC doesn’t have to have a battery and it doesn’t have to have a screen which are big expenses. You can’t just take the price of the steam deck and multiply it because so much time has passed between the releases of the two products and they’re not equivalent anyway. It’s an apples to oranges comparison.

Not as in physically leftover chips. The rumour is that Microsoft or some other company but probably Microsoft we’re looking at making a gaming phone or something so they needed a powerful APU that was power efficient and didn’t generate a lot of heat. So AMD went through the whole designing process with them only for Microsoft to decide at the last minute to pull out.

Very few chips wherever actually made, but AMD still had to eat to the cost of the design process, so they were casting around looking for someone who wanted the chips so they could make their money back. Somehow Valve found out about this said to AMD that if they turned it into a CPU (because they wanted a laptop GPU not a mobile GPU) and made some other tweaks, they’d put in an order for tens of thousands. So that’s what AMD did. It’s unclear if they got a deal on the GPUs or not, whether or not they did will have a big impact on pricing.

This would explain why it’s a mobile CPU, as there’s very little reason you would go that route unless that was your primary constraint. So the theory is that they had a CPU and they had to build a computer around that. Which would mean that the Steam Machine was probably never actually going to exist, and we would have just had the VR headset and the controller.

If this is true then this would have all happened around 2021 so the run will be basically complete now, but valve can still putting orders for more if pre-orders exceed expected values.

There are people online who are wrong. I can’t just ignore that, they must be told why they are wrong.

Seriously though it’s a good idea to correct people when they make stupid baseless claims because other people won’t necessarily have the technical understanding to judge whether their claims are based on reality or not.

Many of the people who are doing this are YouTube or Instagram personalities with lots of children following them, I like this product and want it to succeed, and I don’t want children to lose interest in the idea because their favourite idiot instagrammer reckons it’ll cost an absurd amount of money.

I’m utterly confused about why you are upset that people are doing that. There’s absolutely no need for you to engage in it.

I thought the steam machine was the one that used the arm chip

Which is why all these analyses are stupid. We don’t need to do anything anywhere near as complicated as looking to market interactions and equivalent cost pricing. Because it’s obvious that at $1,000 it’ll flop and presumably valve know that.

I like the theory that they got the CPU and GPU at bargain basement prices because it was left over from some previously scrapped project of Microsoft or something. That would explain why it’s such a weird architecture.

If you install windows don’t you lose FEX? You’d probably have to run it as a virtual machine so you were still getting x86 instruction code translation. But it’ll be able to run Windows applications via wine anyway so there isn’t a great deal of point.

Why is the two terabyte model $300 more expensive than the 512 GB, a 2 terabyte storage module definitely does not cost $300. Also the steam deck is quite old now, so for the same price as what they paid for the steam deck chips they could get a more powerful chip, so there’s no reason to necessarily believe that they are paying considerably more for the chips in the steam machine than they paid for the chips in the steam deck. Also if you look at pricing for equivalently capable hardware you can do it for about $450 retail, and obviously Valve are not paying retail.

I also feel like the question really underestimates the difficulty of completing large transactions in a single day.

Even buying a car often takes two or three days because there’s always some reason you can’t just drive away with the vehicle. You always agree to buy the car, and signed a bunch of paperwork to that affect, and then you have to come back a few days later to actually get it, whether they do some sort of grand reveal with a cloth, as if you hadn’t already seen it, and didn’t already know what it was.

Actually completing the transaction within 24 hours, especially if you weren’t previously aware that you would be doing this, would be quite difficult.

Yeah which makes me think that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Terrible marketing and fairly mediocre gameplay.

Although obviously I don’t know because like pretty much everyone else I never actually played it. And I like hero shooters and even played overwatch semi-professionally, so I would have been in the circles that would have heard about it, if Sony had bothered to tell anyone.

The other problem is that the tariffs could be totally different by the time it releases. I fully suspect that the tariffs are the reason that we haven’t got a price yet.

It would be funny if it is noticeably more expensive in the US though like with the Switch 2.

Personally I don’t think I would say that most people would consider a $1,000 PC to be entry level. To me entry level means something that a kid could save up their pocket money for in a reasonable amount of time maybe with a paper route to supplement. I’d say entry level ends at about $700 just to throw a number out there. For $1,000 you could get a PS5 and a PSVR2

For the same reason that people are interested in the steam machine. It’s nice to be able to just throw some money at people and get a complete product. I can see businesses getting these things if they need a moderately powerful GPU for business reasons. Unless valve go utterly mad on the pricing here, it’s going to be much better value for money than a Mac mini, and it’ll have better compatibility with existing software as well.

The steam frame controllers use AA batteries, the steam controller has a lithium ion internal battery.

Also it does have a USB port but the primary charging method is via the pogo pins. But obviously you might want to recharge from a wall outlet so they also include a USB port. But that’s obviously going to get used far less often than it would otherwise.

As you say valve are incentivised to do this because it will move more people over to Linux. I suspect that they want that more than they’re really bothered about hardware sales so while I don’t think it’ll be sold at a loss, because frankly that would be stupid even if they could afford to do it, but I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near as expensive as some people seem to be claiming.

I would be happy to wait and see but idiots online keep trying to insist it’ll be $2,000 even though the hardware isn’t close to worth that much. Some of these people are big influencers and really should know better.

I can’t really see how we could measure that. How do you distinguish between people who are alive because they’re just alive and would have been anyway and people who are alive because the AI convinced them not to kill themselves?

I suppose the experiment would be to get a bunch of depressed people split them into two groups and then have one group talk to the AI and the other group not, then see if the suicide rate was statistically different. However I feel it would be difficult to get funding for this.

It’ll certainly take you to websites where people will do that though so I’m not sure if there’s really any distinction.

Can’t read the article because it’s paywalled but I can’t imagine they are actually building power stations with AI, that will just be a snappy headline. Maybe the AI is laying out the floor plans or something, but nuclear power stations are intensely regulated. If you want to build a new reactor design, or even if you want to change an existing design very slightly, it has to go through no end of safety checks. There’s no way that an AI or even a human would be allowed to design a reactor, and then have it be built with no checks.