Paying for Quiet

Valve finally ripped off the band-aid and announced the cost of the upcoming Steam Machine. It’s not cheap. Prices range from $1049 for the base model to $1428 for a 2TB version bundled with a Steam Controller. The reason for the high price is that a bunch of ostensibly grown-ass adults refuse to just do their damn jobs or think for themselves, and would prefer to consolidate all the world’s wealth and resources into the hands of the worst people on the planet, relying on the most inefficient computing systems ever devised to regurgitate unreliable and inferior solutions to already-solved problems. But I’ll get back to that at the end of this post. In any case, the most important part of the announcement is how it affects me, and I’m not happy. I don’t think anybody’s happy about it, including if not especially the people at Valve, but I’m not particularly worried about most of them since they’ve got more money than I do. I’d been imagining that the Steam Machine would sell for $800…