a 1200 dollar prebuilt is, generally, a much better deal than a steam machine if your interest is in gaming. It will have more power, more performance, better repairability, and actual upgradability. We're not talking low spec/budget gaming here, we're talking more about a luxury good, so saying "spend an extra 200 dollars for a vastly superior product" isnt so much of an ask.

If you care more about form over function and want an interesting piece of furniture, then I think thats where the steam machine excels. Its not a powerful gaming rig, almost any 3d game you play made in the past 3 years will probably have to rely heavily on FSR to get decent framerates above low settings on anything higher than 1080p, and any 3d game that comes out after this point will probably be even harder on it than that.. but if you're cool with that and just want a neat glowy black cube in your entertainment stand and can accept the limitations, then Valve has you covered.

Yes. The sad truth is that PC hardware has become significantly more expensive and this is what things cost now. Until new fabs are built that can meet the demand it doesn't look like prices will be coming down. That's unfortunately still at least several years away.

This is a static target for game devs, like the Steam Deck. There is an incentive (from Valve) to make proper presets for the SM specifically.

A random Chinese miniPC doesn’t have that. An enthusiast can install Bazzite on it and knows how to optimise the settings for max FPS.

Joe regular can’t or doesn’t want to.

I think it blatantly showcases how backwards our reality has become. Sure you could say you could get something very similar for roughly the same. I would even say you can pretty easily find something a little better for that money but you could also get something much better for roughly the same years ago.

The specs look horrendously bad for the price if you happen to be someone who upgraded just 2 or 3 years ago but the reality is that we won't get anything nearly as good as back then for a somewhat acceptable price for a very long time. 6 months from now the price could actually start to seem a little low and I wish I was kidding.

I genuinely think Valve tried their best but it still feels like a slap in the face by AI companies.

More or less. Because of the design and size and novelty of it, it might be a bit more, but pretty much.

Not in terms of performance per dollar. The steam machine is HEAVILY compromised by the last Gen. 35 watt CPU, and previous Gen. 110w GPU. The entire system performs like a mid range PC from 2021.

You can get a much faster pre built for the same money. You’re paying the SFF and quiet PC tax on top of the RAM/SSD crunch tax. If you don’t need the small size or for it to be whisper quiet you can get a much better PC for your money.