The steam machine handily beats apple in terms of dollar per TFLOP and dollar per GB memory. It's also easier to upgrade, making it likely to last longer.
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 not a terrible price for a unified device that will just work with your steam library. You could save a few hundred building your own but it will be a larger form factor and take a little more messing with to run.
And as the TCO enterprise adage goes: the cost of continued support.
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.
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