oh, you're not going for the Steam Frame Duo? :P

I mean I had an auto-refresher going anyway

I had to give up my index 3 years ago but thought I'd get back into VR with the frame.

Only to find there are only one or two new games/experiences even worth trying out. In 3 years...

I don't have many >50W chargers handy.
One is for my steamdeck
One is deployed at my desk for charging my phone (which is very tucked away and annoying to get to)

New high wattage (which can be trusted to not combust spontaneously) chargers cost >40-50€.

There’s too much money involved.

They’ll cry “national security” and too big to fail, then force the bailouts on US citizens.

It is a high quality VR headset with an integrated computer inside of it. It was always going to be ~$1000. I'm impressed they actually managed to keep it at only $1050, given the current RAM shortage

For all we know, it did. They may have been hoping to release at US$750.

Thin client vs full computer.
Essentially it ahould have been an extreme edition chromecast that can decode the 6ghz datastream. Nothing more.
But it can boot and run cyberpunk (in shit quality but whatever). That was not neccessary.

There are third party wireless streaming devices that function with the Index. It doesn't take much compute to operate wifi and process minimally compressed video.

A headset with Chromebook equivalent hardware would be significantly cheaper than a headset with Steam Deck equivalent hardware.

They wanted a device like the Quest that would let people play decent VR without needing a strong PC. I think that was the right decision when it was being planned. But now that we're mid-RAM apocalypse, the better move may have been to iterate on the Index and not try to make a new platform.

You're then left with a device which costs basically the same as a Quest 3 but also requires a PC to do anything.

That's basically a wireless Index without the lighthouse, which is all a LOT of us were asking for. I don't see the problem and would love that.

A self-contained unit that matched the Quest and wins on not price but privacy was the only reasonable direction for Valve here.

I do agree that the niche they've chosen to fill is valuable, having a good self-contained unit free of Meta's spyware was the entire selling point for me.

I know a lot of people who were looking into PCVR but didn't buy an Index because they didn't want to spend $1000 on a VR headset. PCVR is a niche of a niche audience, so I'm not surprised that they didn't release a product that was just Index v2.

Maybe, in the future they could offer a low-end SKU that was PC-only, without onboard gaming hardware.