The steam deck provides at least a compelling reason and it didn't sell all that great. This is just pissing money away on shitty hardware.
Console buyers are not going to be pulled away from their eco systems and PC builders are going to know better. At best they're going to get a sliver of the pre built market and they will quickly adjust while the box sku will remain largely untouched.
I'm looking for small cheap boxes to put in other rooms for the family and to replace consoles and it's a non starter for me. Who is actually going to purchase this thing?
You could buy a refurbished laptop, or spend a few extra bucks and get twice the GPU 🤷♂️ and a machine with proper RAM and vRAM.
If you need to edit files directly on a device go ahead bust it out, but you're wasting your time decking that shit out with plugins for half the usability of an ide.
As for "environmental issue" 👌👍🤣 resorting to the edgiest of trivial cases in technology as a reason to not do something is absurd. A 25GB hit to a CDN over a month is nothing. At scale either.
Name one other place you expect that level of efficiency. You expect that level of efficiency on Linux repos? What about general purpose desktop applications? I shouldn't get an auto update because I haven't opened an app?
This is expected behavior in any package management application. If someone uses too much cut them off like you would any other repo.
Counterpoint, I couldn't give two fucks about a billion dollar companies bottom line and if you have bandwidth problems at home I don't give a fuck and you can configure your client and router to deal with it.
No reason in the world valve can't do what my Xbox does.
Boomer RFK meme