What SteamMachine will you be building?
I'm thinking of building my own SteamMachine http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown for Christmas. Are you planning on building one and which parts will you be using?
Now, hear me out. I got into computing in the late 80s. The first computer in our house was a serious one, an IBM PC clone in 1985. It had a short stay, but in 1988 we got an AT&T 6300 8086 and a 2400 baud (lightning fast) modem. In middle school I was coding databases in Turbo Pascal, by 1996 I was making websites (one of which is still up), palmtop apps in the early 2000s, running Linux, etc. I've built many computers, done some electronics projects, etc.
Now I'm in my mid 30s and the last thing in the world I want to do is spec out and put together a gaming PC. When consoles finally got Good Enough, I was overjoyed - I didn't have to deal with the all the crap inherent to PC gaming anymore. Memory problems, graphics card issues, driver issues, poorly designed input, etc. I moved from PCs to consoles because when I play games, I want to pop in a storage device and I want it to work flawlessly every time. I don't want to source parts, spec them out, find deals, etc. I just want it to work.
My current work computer is a year and a half old, the one that it replaced was purchased in 2008. That's how I like it. It might not be the latest and greatest, but the value of not having to care about it not being the new hotness is, to me, quite tangible.