Can everyone please stop claiming and speculating that Valve’s new hardware will be loss leaders? If you watch LTT and Gamers Nexus’s first videos on the announcement, they actually spoke with Valve’s engineers. And the Valve representatives already said that the new hardware WILL NOT BE LOSS LEADERS.
There isn’t even evidence that the Steam Deck was a loss leader. All GabeN said was that the lowest cost launch model was priced “painfully”, which doesn’t necessarily mean it was sold at a loss, it could easily have been sold at a very tight margin.
And no, low margins does not meet the definition of a loss leader. A loss leader is a product sold below cost, in that every unit sold actually costs the seller money.
I get the desire to speculate on new hardware. It’s fun and it helps pass the time until we hear more info from Valve. But there’s limits to what is reasonable. Valve has already stated that the new hardware won’t be loss leaders, so hoping and/or claiming they are isn’t reasonable.
Sorry for the rant, but all of the comments that seem to have only skimmed headlines are quickly getting to me
I said “with a few button presses,” not “after hacking it and booting from external media.”
So what you’re saying because Valve supports it out of the box is the limiting factor between a console and pc
The hardware supports it; it could be a PC if you want.
You skipped over the PS2 and how it was a console and marketed with Linux support directly from Sony
Let alone Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3
https://youtu.be/lSP9b4Qcu4M
A clever enough person can get a useable general-purpose OS running on just about any hardware. The entire point is that it’s user-friendly out of the box.
So user friendly Linux running on it makes it not a console? For a while PS3 was just a couple button presses to get a full Linux distro booted on it. I don’t think anyone would argue PS3 wasn’t a console.
No, it just means a console that doesn’t support booting directly into a general-purpose OS isn’t a PC.
Totally agree there. MacBooks don’t even really qualify there and even probably near future when newer Windows devices come locked down.
Wrong. MacBooks can dual boot Linux (windows too on the Intel MacBooks), and you can download code from wherever and run it. There’s a terminal you can run commands in. If you want, you can completely fuck it up. macOS is worlds apart from iOS, and MacBooks are more a proper computer than probably even the Steam machine we’re discussing here.
Actually the current M-series are struggling to be feature complete on Linux, so while what you say was true for the Intel Macs, that is wilting away.