Let's take a look at the scoreboard: A 1TB Steam Deck costs $1,000. A top-of-the-line gaming PC costs $7,000. A PS5 starts at $650, an over 50% increase from its launch six years ago. A modest hard drive goes for rent money. The RAMpocalypse continues unabated. The Steam Machine is a hard sell out of the gate. The reasons for the slow, suffocating death of the hardware market are well-documented on this website, but basically: it's greed again.
For the average person, the latest tech is so out of reach it might as well not exist anymore. It's hard enough to justify the cost of a decent computer with years-old components when every other part of life is more expensive than ever.
