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With today’s prices how much cheaper would you get building similar yourself?
I think it depends on how much time and effort you are willing to put into sourcing and building everything and how important the form factor is. Lots of guys build pretty capable livingroom computers out of old Small Form Factor business computers, but once you have it all together its not a LOT cheaper than this.
It really comes down to how you value your time. You could beat this price, but if you value your time in doing so (i.e. if its not something you think is fun on its own) its probably not worth the effort.
i pieced together a comparable 2tb on pcpartpicker, using the cheapest reputable choices and vendors. it was about $200-250 less for the pc (without an os) in a standard matx tower form factor.
That’s the main reason
That and you have to get the parts and build it yourself, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea
In Poland with already high electronics prices and 23% VAT, I could build something similar for around $1000.
Woo $49 savings.
The thing is, 23% VAT applies to the SM too.
I heard from a trusted colleague that the difference is about $70, but you also get a possible steam controller discount + a sweet-ass form factor + better compatibility guarantees.
I think he got that from Gamer’s Nexus. But that is when you use similar components. You can also easily find components for the same price that are better. Especially when you use the 2 TB model as your base.
But you won’t get CEC or the integrated Steam Controller dongle of course.
Still, while it’s not a great price it isn’t a bad price either.
Or the small form factor.
I admit, I was hoping Valve’s production numbers would have brought economies of scale to make the smaller form factor a non-issue, but that doesn’t seem to be how it turned out
I wish they could scale up massively. They still seem to operate under the assumption that they’re a small player. Though according to one interview (I think with Tested) they couldn’t even source the numbers of memory they wanted. On top of the horrendous price.
In terms of hardware, they kinda still are. They’re not shipping out nearly as many units as the Switch, XBox, or Sony. Sure, some of that is simply their lower volumes, but they also don’t have monopolies via exclusives due to PC being an open ecosystem. After the Steam Deck launched, plenty of other manufacturers either updated or developed new handheld PCs to compete.
Also, scaling up manufacturing is expensive and risky. Ram manufacturers rapidly scaled up production about 10 years ago to address a shortage, and they all got burned with overstock (and accompanying low prices) when the shortage ended. That’s part of why they don’t want to scale up again to deal with the current ram shortage, because they know they’ll get burned again in a year or 2 if they do.
Plus, Valve has already stated they don’t want to own the entire PC hardware market, they want to expand the ecosystem and have multiple manufacturers competing for customers. If the Steam Machine is enough to pressure XBox, Sony, Nintendo, etc. to turn future generations of consoles into mere prebuilt PC’s they’d be happy with that
Don’t forget all the time you save not having to configure stuff and fight with drivers. I enjoy dealing with that stuff because I like to learn, but others might not.
I was going to mention that driver support for known hardware is pretty huge. I am not a tinkerer at all, so I personally find this appealing.
Tbh, it’s not a big issue for Linux in general. Device drivers are all baked into the kernel and get automatically updated alongside system updates.
I made the switch from Windows to Nobara a few weeks ago, and normal tasks have been fairly smooth
I’m gonna say that’s next to nothing, especially when you consider driver support.
Agreed - that’s part of what I meant by “compatibility guarantees,” but I should have called out drivers more explicitly.