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
Prebuilt PC market is fucked, it could be 800 and sell like crazy, if the experience is good
Doubt it.
The steam deck provides at least a compelling reason and it didn’t sell all that great. This is just pissing money away on shitty hardware.
Console buyers are not going to be pulled away from their eco systems and PC builders are going to know better. At best they’re going to get a sliver of the pre built market and they will quickly adjust while the box sku will remain largely untouched.
I’m looking for small cheap boxes to put in other rooms for the family and to replace consoles and it’s a non starter for me. Who is actually going to purchase this thing?
You could buy a refurbished laptop, or spend a few extra bucks and get twice the GPU 🤷♂️ and a machine with proper RAM and vRAM.
PC builders aren’t interested in prebuilts. If this provides 90% of the experience of a prebuilt at 50% of the price, it makes sense. We don’t know the actual percentages yet but you get the idea hopefully.
My point was that many prebuilts are so shit, that it’s easy to make a comparatively good product. I mean ffs some of them don’t even run their CPUs and RAM at advertised speeds.
Laptops are a completely different breed that this thing isn’t gonna compete with, not at 800 bucks, not at 200.
The success of the Steam Deck clearly proves how many pc users prefer a ready to go console-like experience, over high performance. Anything under 850 will sell like crazy. And considering that this is a Linux pc, i saw this as an absolute win. 2026 could really be the year of Linux.
Price out a build that will compete with this and not require an ATX tower.
Have you seen a PS5? ATX is what people already do at this price point.
ITX isn’t the pull here.