- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.
Moore’s Law Is Dead thinks that Valve basically got a bargain bin deal from AMD, who had a bunch of chips they thought were going to be used in a MSFT tablet, but that tablet got cancelled.
So, Valve did some scrapyard engineering, and got a discount on these things that were otherwise never going to be used for anything.
He estimates a total cost to produce of $425, estimates MSRP between $450 to $600, depending on just how hard Valve wants to fuck MSFT with their own leftovers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=sJI3qTb2ze8
If this ends up being remotely accurate, it would be basically a corporate demolition of Shakespearian quality.
Gabe… Gabe was once a MSFT employee, you see.
A disgruntled former MSFT employee, you might say.
Rumors is that the original Zen CPU SoC in the Steam Deck was also the leftovers from another canceled project by “a major OEM”, so it’s plausible. Sounds like Microsoft planned a handheld Xbox much earlier, which years after the Deck turned into the ROG collaboration, could have been related
I had not heard that before, but uh, extremely funny if true.
Its like MacroHard just keeps punching themself in the face.
Sorry but the people getting excited thinking this steam pc is going to do big numbers and hurt MS are delusional. The specs on this thing are worse than the current gen consoles, the base PS5 and the Series X. It is only RDNA 3 so it doesn’t get FSR4 either.
The PS5 and Series X render most games at sub-1080p and then upscale to 4K. This thing is going to have to render at sub 720p and then upscale.
MSFT? Microsoft?
Yes.
Sorry, its either/both their stock ticker, a fairly common way they refer to themselves internally.
I too used to work for Microsoft.
Wooo boy, being one of two people trying to make the multi hundred, maybe over a thousand node, call center / support tree node system work correctly, for the 360, during the ‘red ring of death’ (3RR was the code we used for ‘you are absolutely fucked’)… yeah that was fun.
That sounds interesting. Would you mind sharing a bit more of your experience, if you’re not bound by an NDA?
I have before in other comments in other threads… but I am about to pass out, and being on mobile with a shit tier phone makes searching my own comment history somewhat cumbersome.
Uh… reply to this in 10 hrs and I will probably be awake and find those old comments?
(Also, its been a while since I worked for them, but even if I was bound by an NDA, I wouldn’t give a fuck, I didn’t do anything that important, really. Just another V Dash amongst many.)
Thank you for taking the time to reply despite your situation. I’ll try to remember to ping you tomorrow, but don’t feel obligated.
Ok, I found one of my longer comments on ‘being an ex corpo from MSFT’.
I think the original post topic was basically about how the Windows kernel is now such a mess that MSFT can’t actually understand it.
Stunning 10/10 Glassdoor Review from Happiest Former Tech Worker On Earth
I used to do V Dash contracts for MSFT.
I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem… was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was… I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
…
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT ‘dogfoods’ all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn’t there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
… And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
…
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used… there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use… but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
It is a gigantic fucking mess.
I guess I should clarify that I did sign an NDA, and back then, contemporaneous, when I was still trying to work at MSFT, I obviously gave a shit abiut it.
Now, now its like a decade later, I don’t like, still have a copy of it, and I also don’t fucking care.
I worked in the tech industry, now I despise almost all of it with a burning passion, left it entirely some years back.