You'll be shocked at the number of people who are gaming on the midrange laptop they got in 2016... 

Based of steam surveys this is likely a decent upgrade to half of steam users. Most steam gamers are very casual, there's always this presumption that if people are gaming on PC that they're somehow an enthusiast with a rig they hand picked...

In fact PCs are just needed to get by in the modern world, whether it be to do school work or your job. They also happen to play games. Especially for young people, gaming and discovering steam is just a consequence of having a laptop for work 

GabeCube value depends on the price, but Frame with FOVeated streaming looks like game changer in wireless VR.

Of course, my biggest excitement from all this comes from SteamOS on ARM - that right there is handheld market disruption.

GPU probably isn't that much weaker. It's about 8.6TF (after removing the doubling from dual-issue of RDNA3) which directly compared would be ~17% less, but being RDNA3 vs RDNA2 the difference should be less than that.

Also I'm not sure about the ram situation. PS5 has 16gb to share between system and vram. Steam Machine has 16gb System and 8gb VRAM, so it has more ram overall. How often is PS5 using more than half of it's 16gb for VRAM? No clue, but PS5 also reserves a good chunk of that 16GB for the OS too, which for the Steam Machine mostly the background OS is going to use the 16gb System Ram. The Steam Machine having 8gb VRAM may not be a disadvantage against the PS5. However software optimisation for specific hardware might bring that into play.

It can run FSR4 unofficially with some tinkering. Valve are hoping AMD will add official FSR4 support for it. "FSR 4 support has not yet been formally announced for RDNA 3 GPUs, and Valve representatives had nothing to add to that beyond their own hopes that Steam Machine will indeed receive driver-level FSR 4 support from AMD."

With it having 24gb total memory and a discrete gpu/cpu instead of an APU... I think $499 for the 512gb model is really the best that can be hoped for. If they go less than that they're definitely losing money. It will cost more than the steam deck to produce and they are still selling the Steam Deck OLED 512gb for $549.

I would say Valve won't subsidise it, but who knows. They don't really need to worry about it being an open platform and software sales going elsewhere, because who is going to buy this and not use steam? Even if someone decides to install Windows on it they're 90%+ going to still be using steam to buy games. So if they're really intent on pushing this hard and don't care about losing money on the hardware maybe they can go lower than $499. But that's not really what I expect.

Good points Zippy.

I guess your right, it could be closer to the base PS5 than I originally thought.
And yes, gaming natively on linux is a small market.... so Steam will be how 99% of people that buy this, likely play their games on it.
So I do assume valve can subsidies or sell at break even point for these, since it builds userbase and sales of games will give them a cut on it.

And again maybe I was too optimistic about saying ~499$.
It just didn't look like a super expensive build, but again prices of Ram and SSDs are not cheap atm (AI bubble, eating supply).

"GabeCube" is the perfect name lmao. I love the internet.

Valve is in such a strong position, that they can experiment on whatever the hell they want with minimal risk involved. Like the SteamDeck, the GabeCube doesn't need to sell amazingly to justify its existence or be seen as a success. They're just cool side projects.

$600 at the very least. I expect more.

No more than $600 and no less than $500

Apparently the BOM is around $425 for 512GB version. The BOM for Steam Deck (LCD) is estimated at $300 for 256GB, and its MSRP is $400.

If the estimates are correct I'd expect the price to be between $500 and $550, so pretty much the same as PS5. Add $100-ish for the 2TB SKU.

These all look gorgeous. I'd have to wait for price to see if they are worth it. That controller especially, that's probably a guaranteed purchase if it's not excessively pricey.

The Gabecube? lol that's a good one