Valve dipped its toe into the hardware business when it released the Steam Deck handheld back in 2022. This past November, the company revealed an expanded lineup of hardware that includes a VR headset, controller and a living room game console called the Steam Machine.

The Steam Machine is Valve’s gaming PC, built into a roughly 6-inch cube designed to connect to a living room TV. The aim is to deliver a simplified PC gaming experience for a broad audience. While the Steam Machines’ hardware makes it slightly more powerful than the standard PS5 or Xbox Series X, the company doesn’t see the Steam Machine as a direct competitor to those consoles.

Here’s everything we know about the Steam Machine.

When does the Steam Machine come out? 

Valve has yet to give a firm release date for the Steam Machine, but last November, when showing off the new hardware lineup, Valve employees said it would be coming in early 2026. On Feb. 4, Valve shared its first major update about the Steam Machine since the reveal, and it looks like it will be delayed a bit. 

«Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed,» the company said. «But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change.»

This could mean that Valve was expecting to release the Steam Machine in March, but the company is now changing to maybe a May or June launch. 

Can I preorder the Steam Machine?

There are no preorders available for the Steam Machine yet. When preorders become available, they will likely be available on the Steam Machine hardware page. 

If Valve does do preorders, the company may have a system in place to roll out consoles in a timely manner, as it did with the Steam Deck. With the Steam Deck, you could preorder the device, and based on when an order was submitted, you would get a designated timeframe for its release and when you’d receive it. 

Valve also required anyone who wanted to preorder the Steam Deck to have a Steam account. This would prevent scalpers from ordering numerous devices at once, which will likely be the case with the Steam Machine. 

How much will the Steam Machine cost? 

This is arguably the biggest question about the Steam Machine, and for good reason. Valve said the console would be priced in the same range as a gaming PC with the same kind of power. There has been speculation that this would put the price at around $600 to $800. 

However, the global RAM shortage continues to raise the price of memory. This could mean the Steam Machine may cost $1,000 or more, which would be a hard sell for many and make it less competitive against the PlayStation 5 or a regular gaming PC. 

Valve said on Feb. 4 that it’s still trying to figure out the price of the Steam Machine.

«The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame),» the company said.

What are the Steam Machine specs? 

Valve has released the specs for the Steam Machine, but on the hardware page, there is a note at the bottom stating, «some specifications subject to change ahead of availability.» It’s not common to see that kind of disclaimer, which hints that if tariffs or  RAM shortages make the console too expensive, Valve may make adjustments to keep the price attractive. 

What else is unique to the Steam Machine? 

Valve is doing a bit more than just making a tiny gaming PC. The company is offering some features that aren’t found on the PS5, Switch 2 or Xbox Series consoles. 

To start, there are removable face plates for the Steam Machine. This is similar to the faceplates for the Xbox 360, which offer a bit of customization for the console. 

Steam Machines are upgradable. You can increase the storage by adding a microSD card to the respective slot on the console or switching out the solid-state drive. There is also the possibility to upgrade the RAM, but that will take a few more steps versus the storage swapping. 

The Steam Machine will also be just a computer when needed. Connect it to a monitor with a mouse and keyboard, and the console will act just like a Linux desktop. There’s also the option to install Windows in lieu of SteamOS, which would make it still play PC games, although the experience won’t be as smooth as SteamOS.

The Steam Controller for the Steam Machine will connect seamlessly to the console. And, for multiplayer games, four controllers can connect with a console very easily.

Wait, didn’t Valve already have Steam Machines?

Kind of. Back in 2013, Valve revealed a new operating system called SteamOS. It’s what powers the Steam Deck and creates the Big Picture Mode, which allows gamers to play their PC games in a mostly console-like experience instead of the typical desktop experience of using a mouse to double-click a game to start. 

Along with the operating system, Valve also released its Steam Machine platform. This allowed computer hardware makers to develop computers shaped more like a home console instead of a desktop. Alienware and Dell were some of the notable companies that developed their own Steam Machines, but none of them really caught on, partly due to many games not being compatible with the Linux-based SteamOS. 

The Steam Machines fizzled out in the mid-2010s as making games compatible with SteamOS was not a priority for game developers at the time. It wasn’t until 2018 that Valve developed Proton, a compatibility layer for SteamOS to make it easier to run most Windows games. Proton currently supports more than 20,000 Windows games. 

Valve also ended up offering an alternative to getting a whole new piece of hardware. In 2015, the company released Steam Link, a device that allowed PC games to be streamed directly to a TV. 

The iPhone 17 Pro has wowed us time and time again with its excellent still image and video quality. Its powerful video setup, including its trio of cameras, large image sensors (for a phone), ProRes raw codecs and Log color profiles for advanced editing makes it comfortably one of the most dependable video shooters of any of today’s smartphones. 

Apple often boasts about famous directors using the iPhone to shoot films and music videos. The company even records its event videos for new products with the iPhone. 

But is the iPhone really good enough at shooting video to replace a traditional cinema camera? To see how good the iPhone 17 Pro is for professional use, I gave it a proper test.

I put together a video shoot where I pitted the $1,000 iPhone against a full professional cinema camera rig, worth thousands of dollars, to see just how well Apple’s phone can hold its own. I planned a video production at my favorite coffee roaster in Edinburgh, called Santu, which is based in a stunning building that I knew would look amazing on camera. 

To give both cameras the best chance, I worked with Director of Photography Cal Hallows, who has been responsible for production on major shoots around the world, working with brands including Aston Martin, the BBC, IBM and Hilton Hotels.

Here’s what happened.

Our filming equipment

We didn’t use any external lenses with the iPhone; instead, we relied on either the built-in main, ultrawide or telephoto options. I shot my footage using the BlackMagic Camera app. I had a Crucial X10 external SSD since I was recording in Apple’s ProRes raw codec, which creates large files.

I also had a variable neutral density filter to achieve a consistent shutter speed. For some shots, I used Moment’s SuperCage to help give me a better grip — and therefore smoother footage. But for other shots, I just used the phone by itself to make it easier to get into tight spaces. More on that later.

The iPhone’s competition was the $3,300 BlackMagic Pyxis 6K. It’s a professional cinema camera with a full-frame 6K resolution image sensor and raw video capabilities. I paired that with some stunning pro cine lenses, including a set of Arles Primes, the XTract Probe lens from DZO Film and a couple of choice cine primes from Sigma. It’s a formidable and pricey setup for any cinematographer. 

The shoot day

We shot over the course of a single day. I’d already created a rough storyboard of the shots I wanted to get, which helped me plan my angles and lens choices. I wanted to try and replicate some angles directly with both cameras. 

This shot of the store room being opened (above), for example — was a lovely scene, and I didn’t see much difference in quality between the iPhone’s video and the BlackMagic’s. This was the case with a few of the scenes we replicated. Apple’s ProRes raw codec on the iPhone provided a lot of scope for adjusting the color, allowing us to create beautiful color grades that looked every bit as striking as footage from the Blackmagic camera. 

Sure, you could tell that they were different, but I couldn’t honestly say if one was better than the other.

Other shots were more difficult to replicate. I love this low-angle of the roastery owner, Washington, pulling his trolley through the scene. On the iPhone, the main lens wasn’t wide enough to capture everything we wanted but switching to the ultrawide was too much the other way and we ended up having spare gear and other people in the frame. 

This made several shots a challenge to replicate as the fixed zoom ranges of the iPhone simply didn’t translate to the same fields of view offered by our lenses on the BlackMagic camera. As a result, getting the right framing for shots from the iPhone was trickier than I expected. But focal length wasn’t the only reason using «real» lenses was better. 

The DZO Arles Primes are awesome cinema lenses that offer wide apertures that allowed us to shoot with gorgeous natural bokeh. We used this to our advantage on several shots where we really wanted the subject to be isolated against an out-of-focus background. 

Secret weapons

That was especially the case when we used our secret weapon: the DZO Films Xtract probe lens. This bizarre-looking, long, thin lens gives both a wide-angle perspective coupled with a close focusing distance. 

I loved using the probe lens for this shot, particularly where we’ve focused on exactly where Washington was using the bean grinder. I tried to replicate it on the iPhone using the close-focusing ultrawide lens and the shot looks good, but it lacks the visual sophistication that I can get from a big, professional camera. Especially because the lack of background blur makes it easier to see distracting background items stored under the counter that are otherwise «hidden» in the blur on the main camera. 

But the iPhone has its own secret weapon, too. Its size. The tiny dimensions of the iPhone — even with a filter and the SSD crudely taped to it — is so small that we were able to get shots that we simply couldn’t have achieved with the big cinema camera.

In particular, this shot, where I rigged the iPhone to an arm inside the cooling machine so that it travelled around as the beans were churned. I love this shot — and a top-down view I shot of the arms turning beneath. Both angles give this incredible energy to the film and I think they are my favourite scenes of the whole production. It wasn’t easy to see the phone screen in these positions but SmallRig’s wireless iPhone monitor made it much easier to get my angles just right. Trying to rig up a large, heavy camera and lens to get the same shots was simply out of the question.

How well did the iPhone compare?

I’m really impressed with both cameras on this project, but my expert Director of Photography, Cal, had some thoughts, too. 

«The thing I really found with the iPhone,» Cal explained, «was simply the creative freedom to get shots that I’d have never had time to set up. There’s only so long in a day and only so long you have access to filming locations or actors, so the fact that you can just grab your iPhone and get these shots is amazing.»

«I have used my iPhone on professional shoots before. One time in particular was when I was driving away from set and I saw this great sunset. If I’d have spent time rigging up my regular camera, I’d have missed the sunset. So I shot it on my phone and the client loved it — it ended up being the final shot of the film. At the end of the day, a good shot is a good shot and it doesn’t matter what you shot it with,» said Cal.

So was it all good for the iPhone?

«The depth of field and the overall look of the cinema lenses still come out on top — you’re just not going to get that on a phone,» explained Cal. «When it came to grading the footage, I had to use a lot of little workarounds to get the iPhones to match. The quality quickly started to fall apart in certain challenging scenes that just weren’t a problem with the BlackMagic.»

So it’s not a total win for the iPhone, but then, I never expected it to be. The iPhone was never going to replace the pro camera on this shoot, but it instead allowed us to augment our video with shots that we would otherwise never have gotten. 

I love the creative angles we found using just the phone, and while Cal struggled to balance its colors as easily, the footage does fit in nicely with the rest of the video and makes it more dynamic and engaging as a result. 

And that’s not to say the shots we didn’t use from it weren’t good. I’m actually impressed with how the iPhone handled most of the things we threw at it. 

So don’t assume that if you want to get into filmmaking, you need to drop tens of thousands on a pro cinema camera and a set of cine primes. Your iPhone has everything you need to get started, and it’ll let you flex your creativity much more easily. 

Our days of shooting, editing and grading have proven that the iPhone isn’t yet ready to be the only camera you need on a professional set. But mix its small size in with your other cameras, and then you’ve got yourself a truly powerful production setup. 

Every time I stand at the top of a black diamond run that I’ve never skied before, I have the same thought: «I know I can get down this, but at what cost to my dignity?» 

Sometimes you just don’t know how things are going to go until you point your skis down the slope and tip yourself over that first edge. Perhaps the mountain will surprise you and you’ll ski with the same kind of panache you’re able to muster on green and blue runs. Or perhaps just around the first corner the incline is steeper, bumpier and icier than you’d anticipated, and you’ll be forced to shame-skid your way to more forgiving terrain.

Not all skiers have this problem, but many do. I’m stuck in what’s known in skiing parlance as the intermediate plateau. It’s common among people like me who’ve been skiing for a long time (nearly 30 years in my case) but go irregularly, and only ever for a maximum of one week per year.

Life on the plateau is comfortable and unchallenging. You’ve had enough coaching and experience to ski at a strong intermediate level, opening up most groomed runs in any resort. But your limited practice time holds you back from progressing to anything that could realistically be called advanced — those double black diamonds are none of your business.

That’s how I’ve been skiing for around two decades now. After recovering from the childhood trauma inflicted by the endlessly exasperated instructors at the Ecole du Ski Francais in the French Alps, I managed to reach a decent level that allows me to confidently navigate pretty much any piste. Aside from a few days of learning to float through powder in my twenties, this comprises the sum total of my ski tuition.

I just assumed this was how I would ski forever. How could I possibly hope to make serious improvements to my technique with my paltry six annual ski days and no instructor?

But it turns out there is a way. Enter Carv, a technology that feels designed to give skiers like me the help we need to identify our bad habits and break out of them.

Carv consists of two sensor-packed modules about the size of a standard matchbox  — one for each of your ski boots — costing $250 for the pair. They clip onto your power straps and measure the movement of your feet, connecting to a phone app, which provides you with analysis and coaching. If you choose, this can even be in real time via your headphones. It plays into a wider trend of wearable tech that not only tracks our activity (the most common being steps and sleep), but also gives us actionable feedback that actually makes that data useful to us.

Given that a single day of tuition in the resort where I ski most regularly will also set you back $250, Carv feels like decent value for what it offers (although it should be noted that you do also need to pay a subscription fee to use it, which varies according to plan). That’s not to say Carv is a replacement for a human instructor. But if you want to improve without taking time out from skiing with friends, or if, like me, you bear the scars of childhood ski school, it can be a great compromise. 

«Carv is a way for you to get feedback without really any sacrifices,» Alex Jackson, Carv’s co-founder, told me. What the team has found, he added, is that even tiny bits of feedback given fast and in real time can help change little things. «Honestly, if you can just change one thing, what will happen is… you’re going to unlock a totally new sensation that you didn’t quite realize was there,» he said. 

I was excited to see if he was right.

Hitting the slopes with Carv

In January, I had six days to test Carv on my annual trip to Whistler, where I’d be skiing both with family and alone. The night before I hit the slopes, where fresh snow had just fallen, I charged up the Carv units ready to clip to my boots the next morning.

To my dismay, my first day on the mountain brought an unending torrent of rain. In spite of this, I managed to score a 111 Ski IQ on my first run, with Carv assigning me the title «peak pioneer.»

Ski IQ is a Carv-specific metric that takes your best eight consecutive turns in any segment of a run and provides you with a score ranging from 80 at the low end to 170-plus if you’re Olympic-worthy. I was pleased to be beyond the average skier who uses Carv, who according to the company’s own data has a Ski IQ of 100, but frustrated to fall short of a friend I know with Carv who has a Ski IQ of 124, giving him «line legend» status.

My competitive instinct kicked in and I was determined to beat him by the end of the week (spoiler alert: I didn’t). On the chairlift, I immediately started looking into the data to see where I might improve. I «nailed» keeping my skis parallel, the Carv app told me, but making smoother turns was «one to work on.»

This turned out to be a theme throughout the week. The app identified turn shape as a particular weak spot, suggesting that rather than carving lovely wide C shapes across the slope, I was instead forcing my legs to turn early, creating angles in the snow where there shouldn’t be any.

The data was presented to me in a number of different formats, each helpful in its own way. A graph depicting turn-by-turn analysis showed me that on some of my best turns I was actually well within the «line legend» performance zone, but not consistently. A diagram of my average turn path showed me that I was making a slightly smoother arc when turning left than right. All this encouraged me that I was at least doing it right some of the time, and that with some focus I could improve. 

During that first day I kept the Carv app in «track» mode, and hit a top score of 115 in spite of the inclement weather. I spent the evening watching tutorials in the app and checking out drills to try the following morning.

From couch to coached

The studying paid off immediately. On my very first run on day two, on a wide, empty green slope, I focused on rounding out my turns and immediately hit a new high Ski IQ of 116. 

Perhaps the most important lesson in all of this was that I unlocked the «new sensation» Jackson had described to me ahead of the trip. By finishing my turns properly, instead of forcing new ones too soon, I found it easier to shift my weight to my new outside ski and find the edge. It felt more smooth and natural, and I was able to keep my upper body pointing more consistently down the slope as a result.

«The base problem is we’re teaching your body something that is against all its best interests,» Jackson had told me. «It’s very hard to retrain your brain that that movement is the right one.»

On day three, my family joined me on the slopes. My brother, who lives in Whistler and is unsurprisingly a much better skier than me, hit a Ski IQ of 135 right off the bat (he’s since peaked at 150, making him a «grim ripper,» according to Carv). After our first run together, he noted immediately that my skiing had improved from the previous year. For several seasons now, he’s been encouraging me to take a more forward-leaning stance, to be unafraid of facing down the mountain, but it was Carv’s drills and coaching that finally gave me the confidence to follow his advice.

Over the next few days I toggled between Carv’s «learn» mode, which provides tips in your headphones when you’re on the lift, and «train» mode, which provides real-time feedback on your turns using a series of escalating beeps when you’re on track to unlock a new high score. 

This gamification was especially fun when I was skiing on my own, allowing me to focus on my turn shape and closure, and encouraging me to stay in a solid rhythm even as the pitch of the slope changed under me. I loved that I could separate out and train specific skills, shifting the emphasis away from overall Ski IQ, and instead hyperfocusing on starting turns with grip or steering with my legs.

It was in this mode that I boosted my Ski IQ to 118 on the day before heading home — and on a black diamond, no less — because as of the latest update, Carv’s algorithm now favors more challenging terrain. It felt invigorating in the moment and like an achievement overall for me to get my best score of the week skiing potentially my best ever turns on a steep slope.

Rediscovering my inner thrill seeker

After years of lazily cruising down blue runs, with one eye always on my next chocolate stop, my experience using Carv reignited my passion for improving my skiing in a big way.

«Skiing is one of those sports where the better you get, the more fun it gets — pretty much consistently, right up to the very high level,» Jackson has said — and he was right.

For the first time in years, I had actively focused on improving my technique and was reaping the benefits. My gains hinted at a life beyond the intermediate plateau and helped me rediscover the thrill of the sport.

As Jackson pointed out when I reached out to let him know that I’d felt humbled by my Ski IQ score, improving isn’t always easy or linear. 

«The most important thing to remember is skiing is really hard, and getting better is a) scary (there are new feelings to get used to) and b) takes time (we don’t get to ski every day!),» he said over email. «But even a small improvement, and a little bit more focus on the skiing itself (rather than just cruising) can unlock a huge amount more control, confidence and fun.»

Carv might not be right for every skier, but it helped me tap into the focus Jackson referred to, finding confidence, fun and (sometimes) control. For the first time in a decade, I feel like I’ve shed bad habits and opened up so much potential for improvement.

When I got back home, I continued watching Carv tutorials on YouTube. The algorithms that run my life have been quick to catch on and I’m constantly shown ads for Helly Hansen on Instagram and ski tip videos on TikTok. I’m already wondering how much of my annual leave I’m willing to give over to skiing, and considering remortgaging my house to pay for an instructor for a day next time I’m in Whistler.

Either way, I know Carv will be waiting for me, along with endless opportunities to tackle Whistler’s black diamonds — hopefully with more speed, style and grace.