Turns out I should have bought an OLED even though I already had the first version…

I was an OG pre-order and this price point would have been a big fat hell nah from me. Even more true 4+ years later.

Same, and I too bought the LED and OLED. I sold my LED for $420 (with the new 1 TB SSD from the OLED I bought, added back grips and the original dock) to my friend cause he wanted to get one for his brother.

Not if everyone else goes up too

I mean, it was also popular because it was relatively open in a field of closed handhelds. You could play, basically, whatever you wanted on it. Price was a factor as well… but it was never cheap. Just less expensive than other options.

For real. Doesn’t this just push people toward some of the cooler Lenovos, etc?

I definitely wouldn’t have gotten one if it was more than the $350 I paid. Although after I got one I would have considered paying more.

Noooo way would I pay $750+

There’s better handhelds out there now, but they’re more expensive. The Lenovo legion go 2 is supposed to be good if you install bazzite or steam os on it but the top end models are like £2000

At this stage, the price hike of the steam deck is probably more about making the price of the upcoming Steam Box and VR headset look like an easier pill to swallow, and not about actually needing to raise the price of the steam deck.

Don’t forget the body count!

Thanks OpenAI*

https://swappa.com/listings/steam-deck

Frankly, I’d recommend just buying a Mint condition Steam Deck from Swappa or eBay. And I’d recommend doing it soon BEFORE these sellers catch on to the price increase.

Likewise, I’ve been unemployed for 18 months and have watched as several things I would really like to get have become too expensive anyway.

Yeah, and they’re probably not making much profit on it. The cost of components is ludicrous.

They’re kind of fucked with the steam machine & frame. Unless they can source cheap components they’ll probably have to price the things so high it pretty much ensures these products are DOA. I dunno, maybe they’ll keep delaying release.

Edit - I just checked, the prices have not gone up in my region, at least not yet. And they’re actually available again.

developpers might look at making games playable on less powerful hardware

Yes, please let this lead to devs focusing on efficiency again. I don’t need real time physics simulations and “lifelike” facial animations that still haven’t found a way out of the uncanny valley after like two decades.

I want snappy load times, download and install sizes in the tens of gigabytes, not hundreds, consistent frame rates even when there’s a lot going on on the screen. I have more VRAM than God, yet I still get stuttering in some games on high graphics settings. It’s pathetic.

The main argument against the idea that the steep price increases in PC consumer hardware will lead to a Future of “everything runs on the cloud” and “the end of personal computing” is that the makers of software that can’t run on the cloud and remain decent (most notably game makers, as proven by the totally failure of things like Stadia) will just target their software the the hardware that’s expected that people will have in 2 - 5 times, which as far as we can tell is “the same hardware as people have now” because only a small fraction of gamers can afford to upgrade.

If people can’t afford upgrading their PCs, software makers can’t afford to demand upgraded computers.

I would even say that the trend towards that predates this shit - in the last decade or so it’s pretty much only AAA games who have been pushing the envelope in terms of hardware whilst increasingly Indie games are targetting lower end hardware.

That’s also good for Linux because, lo-and-behold, Microsoft is one of those software makers who with spectacularly bad timming just put out a main product that demands upgraded computers exactly when it’s way harder for people to afford upgrading their computers.

The fact that it’s extremely specialised equipment that’s needed to make the chips of which there is a limited supply due to there being basically only one manufacturer of lithography capable of making chips at the nanometer level that is required, and the factories that produce chips are extremely complicated to make. And you can’t just make more machinery to make the chips because they require rare earth materials, China controls most of the global market for rare earth minerals and because of Trump they’re rationing them.

ram is a volatile commodity that, while difficult to manufacture, is not as difficult as say a gpu or cpu. As a result in the past manufacturers have been pushed to sell supplies at or even below cost. It seems like a no brainer to start up a new fab right now but the reality is that would take years to get to a point where it’s outputting any kind of reasonable supply and in that time prices could (and hopefully will) return to a much thinner margin

Apple could, for example, start up a fab. They have the cash. But it’s a lot of cash, it doesn’t stop (the fab needs continual significant investment to stay competitive), and when ram prices dive they are stuck holding the bag for this 15-20 billion dollar fab that needs several billion dollars a year to keep playing the game. This is why they stick to fabrication of things where they can differentiate (eg m series processors) and control the market. And then they can do what they’re doing right now: leverage their huge position to get far better prices than someone like valve, who’s barely a player in the hardware game, and ensure the architecture of their custom silicon maximizes ram performance (uma) and even use that influence to codesign new types of ram that align with their interests (lpddr5x)

The short version is imagine the world has a production capability of X sticks of RAM per day. Up until now it consumed X sticks of RAM and all was good. Suddenly a new player enters the market that requires Y sticks of RAM and is willing to pay a lot more than everyone else, now the total amount of RAM is X-Y (and just to give you an idea of the size of the problem Y is approximately 40% of X). Factories might start working more and try to produce more, and they might increase productivity by Z, but if Z<Y we’re still in a deficit so we have over demand and lack of production. RAM factories are not made overnight, so it takes months if not years to open new ones and bump the amount that’s actually able to be produced.

It will pass, lots of companies are rushing to open more factories, China has started producing RAM too, plus the new player that was buying Y before and signed to do so for months to come is trying to buy less now.

deleted by creator

Consumer spending is something like 68% of the US economy. I suspect that’s the case in most countries?

Consumer spending drives the US economy.

I don’t think multi billion dollars is enough to fight this behemoth. Especially when it has basically all the support of the corrupt government. It’s a suicide and everyone knows it.