Fairly priced and too expensive

User cantrip in a comment on The Verge:

The Steam Machine is both fairly-priced and too expensive. It's priced at cost, it's just that not many people are going to be willing to pay it.

This is such a simple way to put it, and it's true. Looking back on my post from a couple days ago when the Steam Machine was released, my tone is pretty negative.

But it wasn't negative because I thought the product was bad. I think I was reacting to how I felt knowing that even though the product looks really good, it's priced so high that the people I think would really enjoy this won't be able to get it. And it's not because Valve is being greedy here, it's because the nature of component pricing makes it so that the only way they can make this product is to make it enormously expensive.

The harsh truth is that the free market has decided that the components that go into consumer tech are so valuable, that making those consumer tech products is way too expensive for consumers. I'm hoping we get a correction in the market soon, because in a way I've never really felt in my adult life, it feels like we are doing the paperclip optimizer thing, where everything else be damned, we're optimizing for one thing and one thing only, and everything else must suffer for it.

I write this as someone who thinks that AI is a very useful tool for a good number of things, but that it is not the be-all, end-all of everything.