It’s a little hard to comment on high end 4 years ago with low end now because technology marches on, but no I don’t think it would.

I also built a PC with similar specs for my cousin (we’ll call her Lila) to that in October of 2022, Ryzen 5600X/Radeon RX6800 (non-XT). Built that rig for my cousin. Socket AM4 B550 chipset, 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM. I had a budget of $1500, $500 alone went to the GPU. The 6800 was two years old at that point. Solid mid-range PC that can handle 1440p gaming with no questions asked…okay one question asked: “are you sure you want ray tracing enabled on an RDNA 2 platform?”

You could go higher. 32 or even 64GB of RAM, a 5800X3D CPU, a Radeon 6950XT or RTX-3090 would provide much more solid 4k gaming with significantly better ray tracing…for a couple more grand.

The machine I built last year, a Ryzen 7700X/Radeon 7900GRE for myself. I spent $2000, I got socket AM5, 32GB DDR5-6000, a 16 thread CPU, and the third-to-highest GPU in the range. This thing does 1440p ultrawide or reaches into 4k with aplomb and ray tracing is worth turning on. You can still go up from here; the 7900XT and XTX are even more powerful and again Nvidia offers even higher, and there’s several CPU SKUs above me. Mine is a mid-to-high end PC, I expect it to be relevant for 5 more years, then I’ll buy a Ryzen 11800X3D on clearance for it.

Meanwhile, the PC I’m building now is for a 12 year old (Lila’s daughter, let’s call her Maggy). 16GB of DDR5-5600, a spec’d down 6-core without integrated graphics, the pack-in Wraith Stealth cooler, and a x600 tier GPU for a solid 1080p experience, more than enough for the hand-me-down 1080p60 monitor she’s gonna get with it. This computer is the same generation as mine, but less than half the price at $900 and change. And I honestly struggle to build much lower than that without resorting to used parts, new old stock, or jank.

Gilette gives away razor handles to men to encourage them to buy their blades.

Inkjet printers are often cheaper than a change of ink cartridges.

I think it was Standard Oil, gave away hurricane lanterns in order to sell kerosene.

Most video game consoles are sold for less than they cost to make because the company expects to earn more in video game sales.

I’m right now in the process of building an “entry level PC” from components, here defining it as new currently produced off the rack parts, no used, no refurbished, and with a Ryzen 7500F and a Radeon RX7600 “AMD can’t decide whether their cards get an XT or not, so why should I?” I price it out right at $900. To go much below that, I’m gonna have to resort to some jank.

Dumpster dive a core i5 10400F Optiplex, stick a GTX-980 in it, install Linux Mint and you’re making 120FPS in CS:GO for the price of a foot pic.

I can see several different niches for it.

• PC gamers who want an HTPC. Which isn’t really a niche that is served without building an ITX machine, with parts that are premium priced for no reason I can think of. If you want to play some of your PC games on a television, well, there aren’t a lot of great solutions.

• Console gamers looking to convert. Consoles have come up in price significantly, the “turn on and play” aspects have eroded to the point a console is a slightly discounted mi-tier gaming PC that can’t spreadsheet. The Steam Machine will be at a little bit of a price premium, but you get a console-like user experience with all the benefits of the PC ecosystem, like mods, streaming, self-hosted multiplayer, etc.

• IT professionals who just want to play games in their spare time. I’ve heard a lot of sysadmins and developers and folks rage at the idea of coming home from a long day at the IT mines only to futz around with PCIe lanes and EFI settings. The most hacker dude I know showed me his personal phone: a non-jailbroken iPhone.

• Noobs that are sick of Microsoft. There’s people out there who would like a gaming PC without Windows, but for one reason or another can’t move past the need to buy a computer with an OS installed from a for-profit company.

• Parents buying kids a gaming PC.

“Always” is a bit strong. AMD has been the obvious choice since Ryzen, but 10 years != always.

Has this video been published yet?

This honestly isn’t my experience.

A couple years ago now, I went to install Windows 10 on a PC. It got partway through the install process, and then failed with an “Error 0x76A421B3E7291A” or something. Completely opaque, like the damn thing spat out a memory pointer as the only clue. Installing Linux Mint on the same machine threw an error, “Unable to complete installation due to BIOS TBS error. Check TBS BIOS settings and try again. For more information, see this wiki page” and it gave a clickable link, because this is running in a live environment and has a functioning copy of Firefox installed, and it gave a QR code so the page could be easily pulled up on a mobile device.

Windows is not inherently more user friendly.

Windows 8.1 made me a Linux user.

Going back to Windows after awhile, you start to wonder how you dealt with it.

Windows says shit like “This may harm your computer” for just about anything, especially installing software. Windows users are trained to ignore warnings like that, warnings in Linux are serious.

On the other hand, yes. Reading what is on a computer screen is beyond 117.9% of the population.

I’ve done a long analysis of that incident on using the swiss cheese model, it boils down to:

• There was a bugged version of steam.deb released that would throw an incompatibility with some weirder desktops, to include Pop!_OS’ kind-of-not-quite-Cosmic-yet fork of Gnome. This incompatibility would have it uninstall the entire GUI. Including X11.
• This bug was found and patched long before this. But, the bugged version just happened to be in the apt cache of the image of Pop!_OS that Linus installed.
• Pop!_OS didn’t perform an apt update at any point during the onboarding cycle, or when launching the Pop!_Shop.
• Linus went to install Steam, the Pop!_Shop saw that scary warning about uninstalling the GUI, and refused to do it.
• Instead of googling “popos failed to install steam” and learning how to update before installing, Linus yelled at the camera about Linux requiring the terminal, googled how to install it from the terminal.
• Most install instructions for Debian-based Linux tell you to apt update and apt upgrade before an apt install, but Linus seems to have only found the apt install instruction.
• Possibly because Windows always says doing something can damage your computer, Linus ignored the warning and forced the install to continue.
• APT happily uninstalled X11.

A lot of the fault falls on the design of Pop!_OS and how it handles the apt cache, that somehow neither the onboarding process nor launching the Pop!_Shop did it. Most of the time it’s mostly not a problem mostly. But one time it was a major problem, on international television. In the same episode, Luke installed Linux Mint, and showed it prompting him to install updates, which refreshes the apt cache and prevents problems like this.

Some of it does fall on Linus. Rather than attempting do diagnose and solve a problem, he threw a little bitch fit.

Price firm, I know what I got.

Stop, I can only get so hard.

I doubt “soon.” but hopefully this is a step in that direction.

Hell, even consoles aren’t as easy as they used to be. They require accounts with Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo, they require updates for the console itself as well as individual games, most games have to be “installed,” you still have to think about internal storage…

I’m working on an ~$800-900 build for my little cousin with a Ryzen 7600X and a Radeon 7600 in an mATX mini-tower. According to the specs I’ve read, this is at or above the Steam Machine in both processing and graphics power.

Socket AM5 motherboards are weirdly expensive in the ITX form factor; I bought an ITX AM4 motherboard for like $100 a few years ago, but like, Asrock isn’t selling a B650M-ITX Pro RS, not in this hemisphere anyway. That and non-stupid ITX cases are difficult to find. A lot of the “it’s a PC tower, but ITX size” like the Meshify Nano are being discontinued. So motherboard manufacturers think the ITX market is going for extreme high end, as if we need lots of PCIe lanes on motherboards that only fit one slot, and case manufacturers don’t think heat sinks exist.

Not sure about hate, but the entire Steam Machine thing happened because Microsoft was making noise circa Windows 8 that they were going to take the platform more closed and require sourcing software from the Windows Store, which would shut out things like Steam. So they said “Okay, we’ll make our own operating system with blackjack and hookers. We could take the PC gaming market with us, and we’ll even come for the living room console market and threaten Xbox while we’re at it.” And if anyone in the world is going to get that done, it’s Valve.

But then they’ll implement an AI detector detector deflector.

I don’t think there are any negative connotations to the original Steam Machine. They weren’t successful, but in a way that was okay. They weren’t widely sold, and what most of the gaming public got out of the Steam Machine project was the Steam Controller, Big Picture Mode, and the Proton compatibility layer. Most Windows gamers didn’t notice, it was a major boon to Linux gamers, and then they came out with the Steam Deck which has been a genuine success.

A bit how, most of the time in Breath of the Wild, the gyros don’t do anything. They only activate while aiming a bow, using Magnesis or a few other context-sensitive moments. Because yeah, if it was constantly doing something like camera control that would get turned off immediately.