95% of the time when my best friend and I want to play together (and that's 3-4 times a year these days with him having a family and my starting one), we end up trouble shooting for a decent portion of our gaming time.

I'm not going to fool myself into the steam box never having any issues, as I am truly cursed (so much so that we even have unique problems with our decks), but taking Microsoft issues out of the picture would probably reduce our tech fixing instances by half.

He has the money for a full gaming rig, I don't have the means to get one going (believe me I used to, but I don't any more), this has already been agreed on to be a day 1 purchase in my household, and the wife gets full custody of her monster train 2 machine ("my" deck)

I don’t get it. We don’t know how much it will cost so how could anyone claim they can build one cheaper? Have you seen the cost of memory lately?

it has some unique console features, such as size (you can build one that size but it'll be pricier for the same specs, see linus's monstrosity), CEC support, and a dedicated internal antenna for lower latency wireless controller support

the pre-built market is still huge actually and this will be a pretty reasonable prebuilt for the majority of households

Look, I'm not going to buy one because I already have a kickass rig running linux, but if I hadn't done my recent upgrade I'd hold out for a steam machine. Everything I care about will run on it just fine, and it's an easy sell for people who want a console but need a pc.

Also fuck microsoft.

Well first we don't know the price, other than "like a PC" unless I missed something.

Second, sure, someone like me, who already has the background and experience building gaming PCs, maybe (maybe) I could replicate most of the specs at the same cost, possibly even improve them in a few areas. But economies of scale, the labor on my end, shifting market prices... Unless Valve is marking these things up like 50% or more I just don't see how an individual is going to compete on cost once you include labor.

It doesn't have windows 11, and you don't have to install Linux yourself, and it's small, and quiet, and it can boot from an eARC signal via HDMI.

Given what's happening to memory and nand pricing it may never come out.

This makes much more sense than the actual conversation tho. It's steam box, you put fish in it and it will be cooked after about 8 minute and it's ready to serve.

Wait, wrong appliance.

The form factor looks nice. A small box that fits under the TV.