I got mine yesterday. Copying my thoughts from a comment in another thread:
Don’t mind my essay here. TLDR: I love this thing.
I got mine yesterday. It’s the 512GB with no controller since I already got the controller separately and the 2TB version felt like an especially bad deal.
I was initially on the fence about the price and reserved just to get into the queue to make the actual buy decision later. I was expecting more people to have thoughts on it out before my spot in the queue came up, but I ended up getting my purchase email very quickly on 6/30. I let the email sit for a day but ended up deciding to pull the trigger for a few reasons:
One, I’ve owned every first-party Valve device so far, and all of them have been more than the sum of their parts. Two, I wanted a HTPC, travel, and LAN party PC that’s a bit less restraining than a laptop. Three, being a bit of a performance snob has been distracting me away from actually gaming and I wanted to get back into the no nonsense side of PC gaming again. And four, I don’t mind spending a little extra money advancing Linux, repairable hardware, etc.
I feel like I have to acknowledge reviews from the PC space have been largely negative, but they seem to be undervaluing a lot: the form factor (a 6" cube is still tiny compared to almost all other SFF builds), performance per volume (almost the entire cube is a heat sink), and the benefits of more standard performance targets we’ve already seen with the Deck.
As for first impressions, the device is packaged well, and unboxing was very satisfying. I did have some trouble getting my controller paired since it was already paired to my existing desktop PC and plugging it in directly wasn’t enough to get around that like I expected, but looking up how to pair it to multiple PCs got me past that.
I spent a few hours testing a mix of light to demanding games, and I’m more than happy with what it can do. I haven’t tried gaming beyond 1080p yet, but I’m going to be very selective about when and how I do that. 512GB is proving to be plenty of space for what I’m playing at any one time, and I think that would still be true if I didn’t have other devices acting as additional storage.
I feel like all my expectations above have been validated, and now I’m really looking forward to getting the Frame. I want to make a travel backpack or suitcase with foam cutouts for the whole set.
mereo@piefed.ca 3 hours ago
I will not call it overpriced because the current PC market is crazy because of AI. Even Valve isn’t happy with the price.
chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Yeah, the fact that they are using bespoke parts, but still barely come in above the independent build cost tells me that they aren’t raking billions off of this. I’m fine with the price. Expensive, yes, but so is everything else.
snooggums@piefed.world 3 hours ago
It is ’overpriced’ compared to a desktop in the same way laptops are ’overpriced’ compared to desktops. Making things smaller increases cost, especially when there is a lot of heat dissipation needed.
SystemDisc@feddit.org 1 hour ago
My main issue with it is that’s it’s not upgradable and does not support eGPUs.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Yeah the real money is on the backend when people can now impulse buy games from their couch
femtek@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
I want to see what Sony and Microsoft price theirs at and how much of a loss it will be for them.
stsquad@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
Sony can afford to discount on the promise of online sales and planned cost reduction. I’m not sure Microsoft are going to manage another Xbox.
JillyB@beehaw.org 1 hour ago
They are overpriced and the current PC market is also overpriced.