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Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be. (arstechnica.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 53 points 11 months ago (7 children)

They can't sell this at a loss, or at least it would be incredibly risky. This is (intentionally) "just a PC". It ships with SteamOS but you can of course install whatever you want, including windows. If it is (much) cheaper than a roughly equivalent normal PC, companies might just start buying them in bulk but obviously not generating the supporting sales needed.

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  • [–] 27 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    I heard at one point in time the fastest super computer in the world was a cluster of 900 ps3. It was cheaper then buying a single computer and in the beginning of the ps3 era you could easily format and run Linux on them.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I certainly remember PS2 consoles being used like that. The cell processor was impressive.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    I ran ps2 Linux as my "desktop" for 6 months or so back in the day. It wasn't capable of much compared to a general purpose computer at the time. Videos only played at almost full speed if you ran em in fbdev from a vterm with nothing else running. There was so little ram that using kde1 would run you into slow motion computing because of all the swapping. Window maker was ok, but running much of anything inside it would eat through that 32 megs of ram pretty quickly (I spent most of my time in vterms).

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    I don't think companies would be able to buy them in bulk, at least not directly.

    Valve sells direct to consumer, no retail in the middle, they have their own online storefront (duh).

    They're not going to do a B2B mass order.

    If a business wanted to try and stockpile them, for whatever reason, to turn into their own thing... or, to try to cause a price panic / supply shortage...

    ... they'd have to use/create basically a scalper network of essentially unaffiliated people.

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