I never want to see HN complaining about Apple prices ever again now that I see multiple folks calling the Steam Machine a great value.
Unified memory puts Apple in it's own category for certain workloads however, but since we're talking about gaming here, and not local LLMs, Apple simply cannot compete on any kind of value comparison
It's one thing to value ones own time spent supporting something at $0, but most people probably shouldn't.
And it's incredibly inefficient to debug and maintain your own custom stack, when Valve can assign a team to do the same thing at orders of magnitude lower unit cost for standardized hardware/software configurations.