300$ BOM sounds incredibly low to me, especially now with the exploding prices for storage and RAM. Maybe they have already stocked up on it, but I doubt it. The huge heat sink also cannot be cheap. Then of course there's the whole tariff uncertainty.
The lower SKUs for Steam Deck are sold pretty much with zero margin or even at a loss, as Newell said this was a strategic decision to enter the mobile gaming market. However, for PC gaming, Valve already has a monopoly, and selling general-purpose hardware with little or no margin sounds like a recipe for losing money quick, which is not what Valve is known for...
But hey, we don't have to argue. Let's meet on HN again when the price is announced and I'll happily eat my words. :-)
The hardware does not compare favorably to a 2024 (current, in other words) Mac Mini.
Consider what the Steam Machine requires sacrificing:
- fewer USB-C connectors
- larger physical footprint
- can't buy and take it home today
It's hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison between the chips, but where one is better than the other on some dimension, it's offset by some other. They're approximately comparable.
Now, what's the price of the Mac Mini? $598.92
When people are talking about price points that have a higher margin than even Apple's devices have, you have to stop and consider whether people who are tossing around numbers like $750 with a straight face are actually trying to be rational but failing or they are just totally yielding to getting caught up in the hype.
The Mac Mini for 600$ comes with 16GB unified memory and 256GB storage. To make it comparable, you'd need to configure it with 24GB and 512GB, resp., and voila, 999$. You are surely aware that the lowest SKUs from Apple have way lower margins, since nobody buys them anyway because who wants to live with 256GB of storage? It's just to have that sweet "starting at 599$" on the store front page.
Now, of course Apple takes ridiculous money for additional RAM and storage, but this is exactly how they achieve their famous margins (everything's soldered, so you cannot upgrade yourself). Thanks to the AI hype, DDR5 RAM is very expensive at the moment, as is GDDR5, as is SSD storage. Nobody here, including you, knows what kind of deal Valve will be able to get here. There's a reason they are not announcing any prices yet, because there are so many uncertainties at the moment (tariffs, anyone?), that most probably Valve themselves do not know yet.
Depends what people are buying a steam machine for and what are the alternatives. Can you use a Mac mini for pretty much the same purpose? Genuine question since I'm not a gamer nor a Mac user.
The Mac Mini does not have the sustained thermal capability of the big 6-inch fan in the Steam Machine. So it'll throttle. The Mac Studio probably has better thermals than what Steam will ship, but it's far more expensive.
The Mac Mini can play many games, but it cannot play most games like this Steam Machine. Developers barely supported the Mac before the ARM switch, and now it's somehow even worse.
Gaming with a Mac is an exercice in zen enlightenment.
The lower SKUs for Steam Deck are sold pretty much with zero margin or even at a loss, as Newell said this was a strategic decision to enter the mobile gaming market. However, for PC gaming, Valve already has a monopoly, and selling general-purpose hardware with little or no margin sounds like a recipe for losing money quick, which is not what Valve is known for...
But hey, we don't have to argue. Let's meet on HN again when the price is announced and I'll happily eat my words. :-)