this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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Not now. When RAM prices started skyrocketing. That wasn't only today or yesterday.
It was still well after the hardware was designed.
Companies like Asus fart out new designs every year. It's doable if the design pipeline if efficient enough.
Key word: fart out
What the other responders have said aside, are you seriously comparing a hardware focused company the size of Asus to Valve who's hardware business is more of a side thing?
Not starting from scratch. Those are planned out years in advance.
Not everyone wants a mediocre upgrade.
The Steam Machine uses semi-custom processors. Changing them would have required getting AMD to design new chips, not swapping out off-the-shelf parts. AMD doesn't yet have an RDNA4 replacement for the GPU, so they would probably only go up to RDNA3.5, and that might not have been enough of a boost to even be worth the trouble.
Steam Machine uses old crap AMD had lying around. This is also why it's not an APU design.
Literally on the Steam Machine page:
Were you 100% certain this problem was going to last as long as it has? Yeah, neither was anyone else.
Eh, the writing was on the wall the moment DRAM manufacturers refused to expand capacity and instead stopped consumer sales in favour of corporate batch sales.
Many people were expecting the AI bubble to last well into 2029
Of course. And it will last for years.
In the total project timeframe it takes to design and produce a machine, that is now.