You are seeing it as a PC. It’s not. You have to see it for what it actually is: a console. You compare this to other consoles, not to a PC.

It’s really fucking sad that in making this thing repairable, and relatively modifiable, people now expect everything else a PC has and compare it to a PC unjustly.

It’s not a prebuilt either. If it were, it would have a sticker on the CPU IHS, the power cable wouldn’t be plugged in internally, and the PSU would catch on fire on the 69th boot.

But let’s see anyway:

• repairability
• freedom of modification
• “lifetime” support in the form of security updates, if I remember right; that older steam console still receives updates like 9 years later
• shared library of games, as opposed to a locked down ecosystem like the PS5 or Xbox S
• when it dies you’ve got yourself a linux server because again, it’s not locked down
• all parts are replaceable, clearly labeled
• you can easily upgrade RAM and storage, and they aren’t that weird rare form factor some prebuilts use, it’s just an LPDDR stick I think
• it’s pretty damn quiet
• it’s tiny as hell; in a living room this really matters
• Valve support is known to be top notch
• no online pay subscription
• an open source arch-based OS that you can know for a fact is not spying on you?

But what exactly are the points in buying a PS5, for example?

• having to pay to play online?
• having a dead box after it becomes unsupported?
• getting a shit controller that breaks if your little brother breaths on it wrong and that you can’t fix because it’s a POS?
• being locked into an ecosystem forever?
• have 0 privacy and need to agree to 10 billion TOS’s every time you do anything? That POS definitely records ALL the data it can about you. I think Steam does too but I think the level of scumminess is not the same.

All just so your games run a little better?

If you don’t like it don’t buy it.

If you have a PC you’re not the target audience in the first place.