just looked up my upgrade.

1TB bought in november 2024

Paid 74€ for it.

Similarly specced ssd costs 210€ today. Fucking hell

Edit: the exact same ssd costs 165-210€

We buy a decent amount of half TB SSD drives to add to desktop PCs that we sell to customers.

Samsung EVO drives have gone from $47 to $285 in the last year.

Actual fucking cartel.

is it really that more expensive? because unlike a console the steammachine doesnt require a subscription to play online. PS5+ is 150€ yearly just for that. granted, you get a game per month but the games you get are often games you wouldnt buy anyways. so with the current price of 900€ for a 2tb ps pro youll pay 900€. after 3 years the steam machine is cheaper.

Yes but giving up profits is not what a company does...

And you say forgive, as if they are your friend or something. Its a corporation. They don't give a fuck about you as a person.

Almost all corporations doesn't. There are exceptions. Kagi, the search engine, will give your monthly subscription money back if you didn't search during the month. How cool is that. That's someone who actually wants to provide a product users are happy with.

I really hope China or someone else can step up and just flood the entire market with cheap components eventually.

And so companies can fire the people who do the work (and hire them back later to fix the damage done by the agentic AI), too. Don't forget that part.

fruit videos? is there a recent trend I missed?

paywall

Probably doesn't help in this case, but check out Bypass Paywalls Clean :)

If you click "read mode" (im on librewolf but any firefox fork will do) you can access the whole article just fine.

The last time we saw a price spike like this was when the Chinese adhesives factory caught fire and burned to the ground, those adhesives were used in all kinds of chips.

2013 - but even then it wasn't this bad.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/06/china-fire-memory-chip-prices

There were also supply chain problems during Covid.

2020-2023:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405896322017293

The Steam Machine is intended to be plug&play.

I get where you're coming from. The average person doesn't know how to build a PC, and this is marketed as a plug and play device. Probably wouldn't be worth the support calls, returns, compatibility issues etc when people accidentally buy the wrong one.

It's weird how supply chains work, and how design changes are at the very start of a very long process that makes changing the design now a very costly, risky thing.

Shitty, old processors? In which way?

Zen 4 is literally just a single generation behind current latest gen architecture. And you're way off on the pricing too - Zen5 APUs are essentially the AI 300/400 lineup, of which the higher end models still cost well over what Valve would find affordable. Meanwhile the GPU Valve chose to be integrated into the SM is 30-40% more performant than the 890M bundled with the Ryzen AI 370 (the only affordable kinda-high-end Zen5 APU).

So no, it's neither old nor shitty.

The entire cooling system is designed around those processors. Changing them would delay the Steam Machine by multiple years. Also, those processors may be old (or more accurately, based on an older architecture), but they’re certainly not shitty.