PC Gaming

Oh my god the child journalist can’t even get the successes of console generations right and I’m supposed to care about his analysis?

Nintendo became much more experimental with its hardware—an approach that would eventually pay off with the Nintendo Switch.

“Eventually”? It paid off handsomely with the Wii in 2006, a full decade before the Switch. Literally Nintendo’s first big experiment with console hardware since the Virtual Boy in 1995 was a runaway success.

The Wii sold 101 million units, the Xbox 360 sold 84 million (and eventually copied the Wii with the Kinect) and the PS3 sold 87.4 million.

It took me a whole minute to find this information and the journalist didn’t even bother.

Also don’t just throw this out and not explain it.

Granted, Valve's first attempt at a home console was a bit of a blunder

What? ~~Do you mean Steam Link? Wasn’t really a console, was it? The Deck is closer to a console and it certainly hasn’t been a “blunder.”~~ Oh, the earlier Steam Machine?!

Do you know anything about what you’re writing?

In fact, Valve reports that the Steam Machine is "six times as powerful" as the Steam Deck, and while this is mostly marketing speak ("power" is a vague and complex concept in gaming tech, and isn't a linear spectrum), it's not unfounded.

The Steam machine APU can perform 6x more operations per second than the Steam Deck APU.

This isn't vague, nor complex. The reasons why the Steam Machine APU is more capable is complex, but the results are not.

Quit making mountains out of molehills

Ehh, x86 SoC consoles will always have an advantage vs x86 SoC PCs, because PCs need to treat iGPUs as PCIe peripherals rather than co-processors, which has significant performance penalties and a low ceiling due to bottlenecked heat dissipation.

The Steam Frame should get you worried about x86 consoles, because if devs start publishing native ARM builds for desktop then this whole accidental iGPU performance moat goes away.

Buuut it should also get you excited about ARM consoles.

Personally I am for the Steam Machine, mostly because of its size and that I could also use it for another purpose than gaming, and the GPU seems decent enough for casual gaming (I'm not looking for Ultra settings at 4K, 240 fps, etc)

I read conflicting info regarding RAM upgradability. 16GB nowadays is the bare minimum IMO, I'd rather bump that to 32GB or 64GB, at least if the price can come down.

So long as it doesn't follow the trend of stupid prices, more actual competition is only a good thing.

Whatever happens, the biggest hurdle isn't the price or the hardware, or even the operating system itself. The biggest hurdle are the available games that work out of the box, specifically the most popular multiplayer games. I don't think Sony has to worry anything, because the Steam Machine is still PC hardware and that is usually more expensive than a comparable game console. Usually.