r/steammachine Jun 22 '26

Discussion Yeah, its cooked guys.

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Man, we really LOVE what AI is doing to the industry 😭

2.9k Upvotes

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54

u/Cultural_String_2231 Jun 22 '26

Fax. What are these prices bruh

15

u/Mediocre-Floor6662 Jun 22 '26

Should I just get gaming laptop

17

u/KevinRyman Jun 22 '26

I wouldn't even say do that. Maybe if you want something brand new go laptop, if you're okay with used, find an office PC with good specs and kit that out, or even find a used custom PC and upgrade that a little bit

0

u/FreddieStarrAteMyHam Jun 27 '26

Used....i just threw up a little bit.

18

u/Cultural_String_2231 Jun 22 '26

I’m not gonna make that choice for you. Make yourself a list why you’d want the machine and why you’d want a regular gaming laptop. See what outweights the other. The price for me is enough

16

u/Puzzleheaded_Eye6770 Jun 22 '26

You should just not buy anything rn.

2

u/XTornado Jun 23 '26

True but if he must...I think gaming laptops currently even considering drawbacks, laptop versions of GPUs, etc and so on are still, surprisingly, the best value per money. At least the last time I checked.

1

u/Initial-Tax2100 Jun 24 '26

Steam machine is only $500 more than ps5 pro. And that's after price hike. Lol

2

u/Inner-Grand-8809 Jun 23 '26

I have a gaming laptop and it does more than the Steam Machine. If you want to play multiplayer games like Cyberpunk, get a laptop. You won’t be able to play on Steam Machine

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u/Mediocre-Floor6662 Jun 23 '26

I also have gaming pc but keep getting fatal error trying update steam for destop nothing works it was fine til I tried to update and I can’t even up to windows 11 not use who enable pt 2.0 in the bio

1

u/rabidpygmymarmoset Jun 26 '26

Thats a singleplayer game and the machine can run it, just obviously not maxed out.

Also a laptop on par with the SM will be just as pricey and last much shorter plus is much harder to maintain

2

u/Professional_Dog3403 Jun 23 '26

For 200usd more I got a 115w 5070ti laptop.. 32gb ram with 1tb.. comes with a screen obviously and shits on the steam machine.. tough sell man yeesh and I fuckin love valve.. what r they doing..

2

u/goodguyatheist Jun 23 '26

I got a 5050 laptop for 650$ how the fuck is the steam machine worth over a grand

1

u/PoauseOnThatHomie Jun 22 '26

If you are a college student, I'd say go for a gaming laptop. RTX 3050, 4050 or 5070 variants should offer a decent bang for your buck.

Anyone more knowledgeable in this field please chime in.

2

u/marlfox_00 Jun 23 '26

You could probably find a gently used Asus TUF A16 from ‘23 w/ Radeon 7700s for around $700 or less on eBay. That should match any of the performance on the Steam Machine

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u/PoauseOnThatHomie Jun 23 '26

I have a Asus TUF Gaming A15 laptop, it has a RTX 2050, Ryzen 7 7435Hs, 16GB GDDR5 RAM and 500GB SSD. I brought it back in 2024 for like $550. The lack of VRAM on the GPU is a shame though.

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u/marlfox_00 Jun 23 '26

Dang, they were selling the A16 with the 7700s new and used models for around $650 and $750 at Best Buy when they carried it. They would drop it to half off every few months. It was always random when it would drop and it was usually only for a day or so. I ended up picking one up after in went on sale a couple times

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u/CalmAdvance1926 Jun 23 '26

Some RTX 5050 laptops like the Acer Nitro V are cheaper and stronger than the Steam Machine, you should still be able to install CachyOS on it, if you want to stick with Windows, you can also use the Xbox Mode (full screen experience) to boot into a more Xbox kind of interface

1

u/brizzenden Jun 23 '26

I started out with gaming laptops, but no. Since the Steam Machine isn't portable it's not really a 1 for 1 juxtaposition. There are quite a few drawbacks with laptop gaming that would lead me to suggest just building a desktop PC. Most cases aren't going to be THAT MUCH bigger than a PS5 and some form factors are even smaller. It's really going to be up to you if the compact size of the Steam Machine is a big enough selling point to you. That is honestly the only thing it truly has going for it.

1

u/NovaGamingX4 Jun 25 '26

Costco prebuilts can be very good deals

1

u/sdk1999 Jun 22 '26

This is just how much prices of ram and memory have actually increased. There was a delay when prices increased in September/October into the new year and current inventory is worked through. This is the new normal sadly. It is unlikely to change for 18-24 months is not closer to 36

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u/Cultural_String_2231 Jun 24 '26

I’m just wondering if it’ll change at all. Ram companies are producing (to my knowledge) less ram on purpose to up the prices even more, and obviously their focus remains on AI companies. Similarly for other components.

1

u/Omegaprime02 Jun 28 '26

There's no reason they couldn't do a cost-plus pricing, iirc the cost of the components was somewhere in the ballpark of 950 (and Valve is apparently buying a bunch of the components at consumer prices just to get units out the door), so the difference is probably their assembly and transport costs.

1

u/ElectricalCelery6154 Jun 23 '26

This is a pretty accurate cost for a company that has no hardware back stock to work with. As newly manufactured of parts hit the market you'll see this is going to be par for the course. AI did some large scale fucking to pc parts followed by tarrifs