What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?

For normal computer use (reading email, watching videos, doing spreadsheets), there are much cheaper and better options available. If somebody wanted a Steam Machine specifically, it'd be for the GPU.

If you needed a lot of GPU compute (for AI or blockchain or whatever), it'd be cheaper to buy or rent a dedicated server with Nvidia H100s rather than buying dozens of Steam Machines.

So the only potential use cases are those that have a significant but not too significant GPU requirement. The only ones I can think of are gaming (which is the intended use case), video editing, and 3D rendering.

Video editing is less of a concern because neither Adobe Premier nor Final Cut Pro will run on Linux (to my knowledge), so you might as well buy a Mac that runs both of those very efficiently and has decent hardware.

So we're left with 3D rendering. If people want to use Steam Machines to render things in Blender, I say "let them", and I assume that Valve does too.

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bsder 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> What non-gaming use cases do you imagine people might use these for?

Media box under your TV? Right now I don't have a lot of options that also don't inundate me with ads.

Sure, I can build one, but if Valve can put this out at a price that makes me go "Nah. Not worth building it myself." that's a win.

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ethmarks 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Couldn't you use a Raspberry Pi or a mini PC for this?

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bsder an hour ago | parent [-]

Sure? But RPi's are anemic and not cheap while refurb mini PC's are $400.

So, there's quite a bit of pricing room.

	▲	lotyrin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think the mini PCs they're talking about are more likely to be N100 systems or similar that are sub 100 dollars new. Significantly less anemic, and their hardware media decode (which is well supported by software) is more than sufficient for realtime 4k playback.