You say "skill" but I would argue that personal motivation and interest plays an important factor.

When it comes to different things like fixing your car, cooking your food or cutting your hair, you have the option between saving money by doing it yourself or pay someone to do it for you.

Personally, I'm fine with building my own computer and I cook my own food, but I get a mechanic to fix my car and a hairdresser to cut my hair. I could definitely see the appeal for someone to get a "ready to go"-system instead of putting time and effort into picking components and building and maintaining their own custom PC.

What I wanted out of this was a product that's a complete unit that I can just point people to and say get that. I'm not sure if I'm alone in this, but personally I find specking out PCs to be really boring, I spent forever trying to make sure all the components work together. And then inevitably someone else in my family will end up with a different spec.

This way everyone has the same system, I know it works, and if not there's a big corporation to do tech support, rather than little old me doing it. It's just a shame it's kind of expensive.

It‘s not about lack of skill as prebuilt machines that go for roughly the same are more powerful as well. All the Steam Machine really has going for it is the size. That‘s it. Don‘t need your machine to be a tiny cube sitting under the TV? Get literally anything else. Want a Steam gaming system? SteamOS is free for everyone.

Really the most remarkable thing here is the software with SteamOS and Proton. By a long shot. Those are the big things we should be discussing.

The Gabecube will fade into obscurity in no time. It‘s unimportant and unremarkable.

It is aimed at people like me, but it’s too expensive for what it is. I have a PS5, would be happy to buy this to play PC only games, but it just doesn’t make sense for this price, given the performance benchmarks

I have the skill, but no longer the willingness to maintain said PC for the enjoyment of everyone else who is less technical. Updates on Steam Deck has been dead easy, and compatibility fairly straightforward.

I'll still muck around with my own bigger gaming rig, but for the "this goes on the living room" device the SM seems like a good balance.

I wanted the tiny box format for playing my steam library on the TV without needing to run a cable from the PC. Wasn't sure I could build one this small so I waited to see how much this was.

Around $800 for the 2TB model was my hope when it was announced. Stupid AI data centers screwing over memory prices.

I was hoping for a miracle that I could recommend it to a friend's son as a good entry into PC gaming. But they're on a tight budget and I guess they could do better for the same money.

Or people that just don't want to bother with building another machine to put downstairs in the livingroom or whatever. There are a lot of middle aged people who have been PC gaming for decades, are perfectly happy to build their primary gaming machine, and have hundreds of games in their library, and the means to consider the couple hundred dollar price difference between $1000 and whatever they could spend to build a machine to be worth the convenience of not having to do it.

It’s also a fundamentally different user experience. Sure you could load SteamOS onto a machine you built. But the point is that this targets the couch players, instead of the desktop players. And very few PC players will build a new PC just for their couch.

I love my Steam Deck, because it has caused my wife’s complaints about gaming to dry up almost completely. When I’m at my computer desk, she can’t snuggle with me. But by moving to the couch, we can snuggle while I play. Her complaints weren’t really about my gaming; they were about my physical unavailability. And the Steam Deck allows me to access the vast majority of my PC games on the couch, so we can both be happy.

With today's prices how much cheaper would you get building similar yourself?

I wonder how many people there are that fall in that category but who wouldn't just buy a much cheaper console instead though.

There are things this does that would be very difficult to achieve in a custom build. It's very compact and quiet and has very good driver support without any tinkering. It's a machine you hook up to your living room TV and for that it works very well, including CEC support which is not standard on PC hardware. The price is of course hard to swallow and performance isn't great but i think this thing will definitely sell all the units they can possibly make.