The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blackeco.com/post/2330473
Also some of those old steam machines were comically expensive, in part because all the different vendors wanted a cut, in part because some of them made new cases
edit: found a spec sheet for the cheapest version of Bolt II, for almost $1800 you got a gtx 760 and i5 4590, 16 gigs of ddr3, 120gb ssd + 1tb hdd. All of it air cooled. I don’t remember new hardware prices back then but it seems steep. And it’s far from the most expensive one.
edit2: on the other end of the spectrum, for $400 (without an OS) you could get ibuypower’s SBX with an athlon x4 840, 4 gigs of ram and an r5 250X