I Love The Steam Machine More Already - WAN Show June 26, 2026

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Linus Sebastian** (0:38)
What is up, everybody? And welcome to The WAN Show. We have a great show lined up for you guys this week. The big launch was, of course, the Steam Machine, the Gabe Cube, the overpriced gaming console. Call it whatever you want. Already, having spent only four additional days with it, since we published our review, I love it. Probably three times more than I did when I first evaluated it. And I'm going to talk about why, and it has nothing to do with gaming.
I'm going somewhere with this.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:23)
Can that be topic one?

**Linus Sebastian** (1:24)
There will also be cake. In other news...

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:29)
Oh wait, it's actually the... Okay, that's cool.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:31)
In other news, Microsoft's June update fixed 208 security flaws, while also introducing a cascade of new bugs across all Windows versions. And that ties into why I am loving the Steam Machine so very, very much right now. What else we got this week, Mr. Lafreniere?

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:54)
China's Ministry of State Security accuses spy turtles and spy fish of stealing sensitive marine data.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:01)
You picked that.

**Luke Lafreniere** (2:02)
But if you want a more serious topic, his happiness around the Steam Machine might be able to come to you without buying it, because soon you can too, you too can run the Steam, oh my goodness, you too can run SteamOS on your own hardware.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:36)
The show is brought to you today by AMD, Redtiger and Shokz, along with our rap partner Dbrand, our laptop partner Razer, and our chair partner who is also Razer. Let's jump right into our headline topic. Let's do the quick sort of rundown of the, what?

**Luke Lafreniere** (2:54)
I wanna, I'm so curious about your Steam Machine comments.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:57)
Yeah, that's the headline topic.
You're literally slowing down me talking about the headline topic.
You're behaving like someone who, instead of getting into the headline topic, is gonna go and draw everyone's attention to the fact that it's Lime Day, with the freshest deals of the year.

**Luke Lafreniere** (3:12)
That was crazy.

**Linus Sebastian** (3:13)
You can shop Lime Day now. There's combo deals, like loaded up backpack bundles. We've got commuter bundles with gift cards. We've got the screwdriver plus stubby screwdriver bundle for 99 USD. We've got deals on cable management, arches, our new Map of Siberia desk pad, other desk pads. All you got to do is head over to lttstore.com. It's a great week to send a comm, a checkout message. We've got end of season clearance on a bunch of apparel.
lttstore.com/collection/limedashday. Head over there and send a checkout message. It'll go to producer Dan. Yeah, we're doing it that early. And he will curate it or he'll put it up on screen or he'll respond to it himself, usually in his fantastic snarky way. Anyway, what I actually want to talk about right now is the steam machine. Let's get through kind of the bones of what happened this week for anyone who lives under a freaking black cubic rock. That's exactly where I was going with that. Nice, we got the wavelength on today.

**Luke Lafreniere** (4:16)
I'm not sick anymore.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:18)
And then I want to talk about why I love the steam machine so much more today than I did even just a few days ago. All right.
Valve engineer. Okay, this week, Valve launched the steam machine. It's got six AMD cores. It's got about a 7600-ish class GPU. It's got 16 gigs of RAM and eight gig GPU. It's got 512 gigs or two terabytes of storage. And it landed at a whopping $1,050 US dollars starting price, which took a lot of wind out of the internet excitement sales. Because a modestly specced but very small, compact, quiet gaming machine is fine, as long as it doesn't cost more than $1,000 US dollars. And unfortunately, it did. Valve engineer, Yazan Aldehiyat, told Eurogamer that the Steam Machine price is significantly more than they planned. And we all know what that is because of, he added that while Valve was aware of component market trends, he didn't think anybody really expected or predicted the extent to which they were going to go up and are still going up. In a Steam Machine FAQ from before that PC Console Hybrid's price announcement, Valve said, the limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping and pricing schedule. So we've known for a while that they were going to have to adapt the price.