The Verge: ▽ The Steam Frame is made for irresponsible hardware nerds like me

NEWS EDITOR

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I'll admit, I did exactly what Sean said I shouldn't: I wrote Valve's Steam Frame off as an oddly expensive VR headset that's a few years late to the party. Instead, it's so much more, capable of VR gaming, regular PC gaming on a headset, or creating a full virtual workspace — an Apple Vision Pro built with gamers in mind. I still wouldn't drop over a grand on one, but it sounds like only a specific sort of person should: Anyone willing to put up with the bugs, flaws, and all-around issues that come with hardware that feels like it's still in beta.

By

Sean Hollister

For nearly three weeks, I’ve been testing the limits of Valve’s Steam Frame, the company’s new wearable PC. At first glance, it’s easy to write it off as a pricey headset that missed the VR craze. At $1,059 with 256GB of storage or $1,299 for 1TB, it costs two to three times as much as similar-looking headsets from Meta.

You should not write it off that way. The Steam Frame isn’t just a VR headset. It’s not even

primarily

a VR headset. It’s an experimental attempt at a complete spatial computer that you can wear, not unlike the Apple Vision Pro, only here it’s aimed at gamers who want to play their flat library of Steam games plus the handful of VR titles on tap.

No, if you write off the Steam Frame, it should be because you don’t want to pay $1,000-plus for early access hardware. Every day I spend with the Steam Frame, I feel like a beta tester, but it feels like one of the most exciting betas I’ve ever tried.

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When Open AI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google Deep Mind cofounder Demis Hassabis, and Space X head Elon Musk loosely agreed over the weekend to slow down AI development, skeptics spotted an ulterior motive immediately. The AI titans had declared that their aim was to “pace the frontier,” signing on at least partially to a proposal for embedding third-party auditors, regulating domestic labs, and reaching a global slowdown agreement. Their critics, however, argued they simply wanted to stop would-be competitors, kneecap the open-source movement, and avoid real legal safeguards — some dubbed it an outright “cartel.”

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tells it compellingly and convincingly, but doesn’t offer much in the way of revelations if you’re aware of Musk’s catastrophic influence on the world. For everyone else, a demanding runtime just shy of four hours might prove too much of a barrier to being convinced.

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