Not necessarily. Many off-shelf desktops are, let’s put it nicely, “highly optimized for mass production.” They may not have open slots required for upgrades. In the case of a GPU or CPU upgrade, the slot may be incompatible altogether, or, the mainboard may not have the proper bus to support the upgrade. I’ve had to sunset old machines that I built because I couldn’t upgrade them. Not because they were incapable, but because the supported hardware was no longer in production. The only option for a RAM upgrade was paying some dingus on eBay $500 for a stick that would have been $60 if it was still in production.
As I said: You’re a builder. It is not a value-add for you. You are not in their target demographic. I know a lot of people that would very much like to buy a gaming-ready PC that isn’t loaded with crapware though. The Steambox is an actual PC. It’s running SteamOS, which is just a Linux port. It has all the same functionality as a PC. If you don’t like SteamOS, then go install Wine, or Ubuntu, or whatever flavor of Linux you prefer. Nobody is stopping you.
Even if you have an off the shelf PC, upgrading that PC would probably be cheaper and provide more functionality.
Not necessarily. Many off-shelf desktops are, let’s put it nicely, “highly optimized for mass production.” They may not have open slots required for upgrades. In the case of a GPU or CPU upgrade, the slot may be incompatible altogether, or, the mainboard may not have the proper bus to support the upgrade. I’ve had to sunset old machines that I built because I couldn’t upgrade them. Not because they were incapable, but because the supported hardware was no longer in production. The only option for a RAM upgrade was paying some dingus on eBay $500 for a stick that would have been $60 if it was still in production.
As I said: You’re a builder. It is not a value-add for you. You are not in their target demographic. I know a lot of people that would very much like to buy a gaming-ready PC that isn’t loaded with crapware though. The Steambox is an actual PC. It’s running SteamOS, which is just a Linux port. It has all the same functionality as a PC. If you don’t like SteamOS, then go install Wine, or Ubuntu, or whatever flavor of Linux you prefer. Nobody is stopping you.