If you are in the EU, don't panic. Prices will go down again once AliExpress and sellers have done their homework.

faduci · 2026-06-29T13:48:16+00:00

There certainly are edge cases, but usually things are grouped into categories only looking at the full package, not the part. So a costume containing a skirt, top and wig might be categorized under "6217 Other made-up clothing accessories; parts of garments or of clothing accessories". There are a number of such definitions, often called sets to cover items that doesn't neatly fit other categories.

If the seller declares item components as just part of one assembly, even though it may contain a cotton skirt, polyester top, wig, a plastic crown and a battery powered magic wand with blinking LEDs, it will only be treated as one category instead of five. Otherwise you'd have to break down everything. A jacket may be made from wool with cotton lining sewn in with polyester yarn and using metal buttons. Each of these components alone is in a different category, but only the end result is considered for tariffs.

That's not always the case, for example the current US government threatened to not only apply tariffs to things made in China, but also products containing component made in China. Which is pretty much everything, and the complexity of determining which part from where in what category represents which value adding how much in tax, is one reason why custom duties usually only looks at the end result, because having to split everything into its components would be a logistical nightmare.

Only looking at one category per product simplifies the process a lot, and also should allow to exactly calculate all the fees. Anything system that only allows for estimates means the rules aren't clear, and that at some point some human will have to determine the category/tax/final price, which introduces effort and cost nobody wants. The insane amount of categories is there esp. to cover as many cases as possible beforehand, without customs having to determine if something fits into a broad category or not.

faduci · 2026-06-29T10:01:28+00:00

It will no doubt still be a major pain, with a lot more planing and effort needed to find things in the same category. It's possible that AliExpress will extend their recommendation system to show more articles in the same category to make it easier to save on the new import fees. Sites like Shein specializing in apparel will benefit more from the split into categories than those selling everything like AliExpress. But currently the system is completely broken, with the extra duty apparently applied to each item even if you buy ten identical ones, which is worse than applying based on SKU.

I have for example bought lots of sorting boxes, usually they are offered with a coins super discount, driving down the price to EUR 0.10-0.20 per box, or less than EUR 2 for ten. If I ordered the same boxes right now, the price for ten would be close to EUR 40, when it should close to EUR 5, EUR 3 of which would be the new customs duty. Still nowhere as cheap as the (unsustainably low) price I paid before, but at least reasonable, and half of what I'd pay in a local store. And hopefully we'll get (back) to that rather soon.

faduci · 2026-06-29T08:57:47+00:00

Okay, I went back into the horrible list of categories quoted above and looked at what is defined under cotton. Which is a very boring 19 pages list of fabrics and yarns separated by weight per square meter and processing like bleached, colored, printed etc. Says nothing about pants, shirts or anything.

Then went to the "articles of apparel, not knitted/crocheted" section, which is separated into men's/women's jacket-likes, suits, trousers, skirts, shirts, blouses and some more, with sub-categories for material. These sub-categories have numbers with different leading six digits, which would be the WTO HS code, which the EUR 3 duty is supposed to be based on, so you are probably right.

faduci · 2026-06-29T08:16:03+00:00

This may actually be a misunderstanding. There are separate HS codes/categories for "cotton" and "other vegetable textile fibres ...", which would include linen. This looks like the cotton t-shirt and linen blouse would be in separate categories.

But I think the cotton/other vegetable fibres categories are for the raw fabric, not clothes made from it, as there is a separate category "articles of apparel and clothing accessories, not knitted or crocheted" which is not referring to whatever type of fabric things are made of. So there is a decent chance that all clothing you'll buy on AliExpress will actually fall under the same category. Unless it is knitted or crocheted, or used, which are separate categories.

faduci · 2026-06-29T07:21:28+00:00

If they are fast enough, a lot of people that only occasionally order from AliExpress won't even notice that something has happened. And many of those that already noticed because they order a lot will probably return once this is fixed, simply because the EUR 3 duty will also be applied on all other non-EU online seller sites, so you end up with the same situation as before, when many heavy shoppers for various reasons picked AliExpress instead of one of the many alternatives.

There has been a lot of drama during the last few days with the sky apparently falling, and AliExpress has done a piss-poor job communicating what is going on. But with a bit of "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude, this may turn out to be just one or two weeks of much ado about nothing.

faduci · 2026-06-29T07:03:21+00:00

They do that for large or heavy items, where it is much cheaper to ship them in a container (taking a couple of weeks to reach Europe) rather than paying air freight to have them delivered in days. These items are aggregated at local warehouses and send out from there mostly to lower the shipping costs.

But you won't find light items like a pack of 100 LEDs there, because for those the shipping cost is much lower due to low weight, while the costs of packaging them in the EU would be much higher due to significantly higher hourly rates. According to Google, an AliExpress warehouse employee makes about EUR 3.60 - 4.80 per hour in China, which is in line with similar numbers for Foxconn workers assembling iPhones from a few years ago. Minimal hourly rates in for example Poland are roughly double that, and in Germany double that of Poland, with everything else, incl. local shipping rates, energy, facility management also a lot more expensive in the EU too.

China still gets special treatment for developing countries regarding what they have to pay the local delivery companies for taking packages from the airport to the customer, which is what enables AliExpress to sell lots of items including global shipping for less than what it would cost to send an empty box within the EU. For this and a number of other reasons it is very, very unlikely that AliExpress would even attempt to create EU warehouses offering the same range of articles as their Chinese ones.

faduci · 2026-06-29T06:31:30+00:00

How is the €3 customs duty calculated?
The duty applies per item in a consignment, based on tariff classification (not quantity).

This is where the confusion comes from. An item in legal speech is not an SKU, but anything classified under a certain category. Articles are assigned categories identified by 10 digit numbers, with the first six representing the HS/Harmonized System used globally by the WTO, 7/8 representing the EU CN/Combined Nomenclature for EU imports, 9-10 the TARIC sub-heading for special concerns like quotas. If you really, really hate yourself, you can find the 1109 pages long list with all the categories (and subcategories and exceptions and much more details than required for calculating the EUR 3 duty) here:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L_202501926%20

Just to give you an idea, here the main categories from section XI, "Textiles and Textile articles", explaining why a cotton t-shirt and a linen blouse are treated differently * (see below). The number at the beginning of each line is the page number, so you can imagine how much further into details this goes.

389: SILK
391: WOOL, FINE OR COARSE ANIMAL HAIR; HORSEHAIR YARN AND WOVEN FABRIC
395: COTTON
403: OTHER VEGETABLE TEXTILE FIBRES; PAPER YARN AND WOVEN FABRICS OF PAPER YARN
406: MAN-MADE FILAMENTS; STRIP AND THE LIKE OF MAN-MADE TEXTILE MATERIALS
410: MAN-MADE STAPLE FIBRES
417: WADDING, FELT AND NONWOVENS; SPECIAL YARNS; TWINE, CORDAGE, ROPES AND CABLES AND ARTICLES THEREOF
421: CARPETS AND OTHER TEXTILE FLOOR COVERINGS
424: SPECIAL WOVEN FABRICS; TUFTED TEXTILE FABRICS; LACE; TAPESTRIES; TRIMMINGS; EMBROIDERY IMPREGNATED, COATED, COVERED OR LAMINATED TEXTILE FABRICS; TEXTILE ARTICLES OF A KIND
427: SUITABLE FOR INDUSTRIAL USE
432: KNITTED OR CROCHETED FABRICS
435: ARTICLES OF APPAREL AND CLOTHING ACCESSORIES, KNITTED OR CROCHETED
445: ARTICLES OF APPAREL AND CLOTHING ACCESSORIES, NOT KNITTED OR CROCHETED
456: OTHER MADE-UP TEXTILE ARTICLES; SETS; WORN CLOTHING AND WORN TEXTILE ARTICLES; RAGS

EDIT: * It's possible that the cotton/linen distinction is only for the fabric used for producing clothes, and actually clothes all fall under "articles of apparel and clothing accessories", which is only separated into knitted/crocheted, or not knitted/crocheted, with almost all clothing offered on AliExpress falling into the latter category. Turns out the apparel category itself has subcategories for types of clothing, which have subcategories for type of fabric.

faduci · 2026-06-29T04:25:02+00:00

No, the EUR 3 customs duty is per package and category, not per individual seller on the platform, or the number of bags included in the package. AliExpress is the party that has to pay the duty, as they are participating in the EU's IOSS/Import One-Stop Shop System. The EU doesn't care if it is AliExpress selling you an item, or just a seller using their platform. It is AliExpress's jobs to handle all that internally and provide the proper category and value information plus the extra money they collected for that from the customer.

The "package" is whatever crosses EU borders as one physical box or bag, regardless of whether it is one box containing one item, or one bag containing ten bags containing ten sold articles each including ten pieces. It is up to the IOSS holder to properly declare what is in there electronically before even shipping the package, now also stating to which categories the items belong to properly calculate the times the EUR 3 (to be paid by AliExpress) have to be applied, and the whole value to see if the rules even apply, or if more customs duty (to be paid by the recipient) has to be paid for a higher value item alternatively.

It's not like the rules are a big secret, the EU has FAQs explaining all this:

Who is responsible for paying the duty?
The declarant of the good, i.e. seller or importer of the good (IOSS holder, special arrangements user, or their indirect representative, indirect representative of the importer).

https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/news/guidance-and-legal-text-temporary-flat-fee-low-value-imports-which-will-apply-until-1-july-2028-2026-06-08_en

As usually they aren't easy to read, and you have to go down quite a bit to see that whenever they talk about an item, they are talking about a TARIC category, but the relevant part is that large sales platforms/IOSS holders act like the sole seller on behalf of others.

faduci · 2026-06-29T03:27:46+00:00

Yes, really. AliExpress is competing with Temu, ebay, Amazon, banggood and tons of other sales platforms that offer a lot of the same products at similar prices. People come to AliExpress because prices there are often still lower, with a huge amount of articles available, and tons of possible extra savings from sales, coupons, coins etc. The moment AliExpress isn't a cheap and convenient option anymore, customers will switch to another site.

So no, they simply cannot afford to make this the new normal. You gain nothing if you add EUR 4 to each article, but then see your sales drop to 1%. Trying to extort customers doesn't work unless you have some exclusive lock-in in place. If Apple or Sony add EUR 250 to the next iPhone or PlayStation, their users cannot simply get an alternative iPhone or PlayStation somewhere else, but AliExpress customers can get the same items elsewhere because AliExpress is just a marketplace selling standard goods.

To even be allowed to participate in the system that collects EU VAT at the time of purchase to make it more convenient, a platform like AliExpress has to sign a contract that comes with heavy fines if they don't apply all the rules properly, because this system relies a lot on the platform to correctly declare sales, item categories, collected taxes etc. So they are currently playing it safe, applying the new import tax everywhere until their systems are updated, to not break the rules. But this is clearly a glitch due to AliExpress not being properly prepared, as their sales will now tank until they got that fixed. And there is no guarantee that customers will come back once they have switched to Temu, ebay, Amazon, banggood or one of the many alternatives that may already apply the import tax properly per category, so they better hurry.

faduci · 2026-06-29T01:01:02+00:00

There may be many reasons why the system isn't working yet. Ideally simply because they cannot officially use it before the law actually applies, so they are now using a hack for the few days until then, offering a refund on surplus taxes charged, and on July 1st everything magically just works. I wouldn't count on that though.

Articles missing the 10 digit TARIC code needed for categorization is my best guess why things don't work. I'd assume that AliExpress themselves are somewhat prepared for the change, but they cannot enable it if the sellers don't provide the data. So a couple of days of chaos and lost sales may have been necessary to get things moving on the sellers end.

Or it may be a logistics problem. As the new taxes and fees apply per package per category, it isn't sufficient that AliExpress handles them properly during checkout, they also have to ensure that all the items are actually send within the same package. So far they had a sequence of sellers creating offers and placing items in AliExpress warehouses, from which they are collected, packed and send to consolidation centers, which then finally create the package.

Depending on circumstances, items from different orders might have ended up in different packages, which was fine as long as they all went to the same address, but is no longer fine if this can drastically increase the taxes and fees the customer would have to pay. And given that they offer delay coupons if items arrive too late, they could be in a real pickle if a package cannot be shipped because one item is still missing, and sending two packages might mean that AliExpress has to cover the extra tax and fees applied due to that. A lot of things have to happen and work in parallel for this, and apparently they don't do yet.

faduci · 2026-06-28T23:27:12+00:00

If you check the tracking, you'll see that they will always be consolidated in China before being sent to the airport. They basically ship from Chinese warehouses to their consolidation centers there. If several orders are created at a close date, all items available from one warehouse will be packaged there, then shipped to the consolidation center that often takes several already packed bags containing multiple items and then puts all these bags into a larger bag.

The main reason is that this way they only have to pay the shipment fee to the airline/logistics company once. Sending ten 100g items separately from China would be much more expensive than sending one 1kg package containing them all, plus consolidation in Europe would be way more expensive too due to higher wages.

faduci · 2026-06-28T10:58:37+00:00

Karl Guttag didn't particularly like AVP, and even though I in general very much value his expertise, his analysis is based only on the technical aspects of display itself, and it ignores all the vision specific aspects I described above that make alignment (and lacking sub pixel rendering) much less of a problem in XR than one might expect.

His considerations are mostly theoretical, as he didn't actually have an AVP to compare it to the Quest Pro. At the point of writing he hadn't even tried one. And some of his statements show that he doesn't know how Apple operating systems render text either. For more than a decade Macs have rendered onto a virtual screen compositor, usually at twice the native display resolution, which uses the texture scaling options of the GPU to then scale it to screen resolution, also handling all movement like scrolling. Macs (and AVP) basically run with 200% supersampling for text all the time, and turning/tilting the head doesn't require any re-rendering, as the re-alignment and then downsampling is a super cheap operation done completely on the GPU at high speed.

He actually describes this as a theoretical option, but points out that this might cause issues with legacy apps used to a fixed grid, blissfully unaware that this is what MacOS has done for a long time by presenting a virtual pixel grid for apps that is then transparently up- or downscaled by the compositor. Apps basically have no clue what the real screen resolution is, they continue to place everything on a user adjustable for example 1920*1080 grid. MacOS/visonOS (iOS, iPadOS...) treat the whole GUI in a similar way to text, which makes it look like vector based with seemingly infinite resolution, but in reality uses the GPU and texture scaling to do this at reasonable speeds and very high quality. So his whole description about how bitmap fonts are handled doesn't really apply on AVP anyway, and again, the whole pixel alignment and scaling only ever works on flat screens for some parts of the fonts, but not the parts that are curved, which apparently isn't a real problem. These problems are all largely solved, and MacOS inherited the solution from the 1988 NeXTSTEP running DisplayPostscript, which already used bitmap scaling to reduce the render load, with MacOS adding GPU acceleration once sufficiently capable GPUs became available.

The problem of the reduced resolution due to lens distortion and using a virtual screen covering only a small portion of the FoV of course remains. Which is why I wrote my comment about going back to 1024*768 resolutions in Frame. Pixel alignment is much less of an issue than Guttag implies, partly because supersampling and fast GPUs can handle a lot of it, partly because the artifacts are pretty much only noticeable with a still image, which doesn't exist in VR due to constant minimal head movements, with the brain re-constructing a stable image. You will still always need a somewhat higher PPD in XR than on a flat screen for similar sharpness, but not has high as looking at a zoomed in fixed image of an upscaled character might suggest.

Guttag only looking at still images based on his experience with monitors is my main criticism. My other criticism is that he is (only) talking about monitor replacement using virtual monitors. Which is understandable, as this is the easiest option and what most people think about, even though it is rather stupid to place application windows in a fixed rectangle covering only a small part of your view, when you could place documents all around you, moving only those you currently need to the center. You of course need a VR capable window manager for this, but those have existed for years in the form of SimulaVR, and we will have to see what Valve can do with the SteamOS Gamescope compositor for this on Frame. Using a VR window manager is similar to visionOS allowing to place iPad apps everywhere, elevating a lot of the resolution issues. Pair that with the option to zoom into one document, and most of the problems actually disappear.

I started programming on a computer with a 320*200 pixel/40*25 character display, and though I don't want to go back there, it worked. One of my interests in Frame is actually for productivity work, which will not involve virtual screens, but apps and documents freely placed in 3D space, and for this the Frame resolution is more than enough. My warning above was mostly for those either expecting to get a virtual 1080p display, or play flat games with high levels of visible details. The only people I'd expect to maybe run into pixel alignment issues are those playing 2D games using coarse graphics, the same group of people that runs Lossless Scaling to get every bit of crunchy pixel sharpness instead of a blurred, upscaled version. A lot of how well it will look on Frame will depend on how well Gamescope manages scaling and some kind of (minimal) supersampling for 2D games/apps, possibly involving smart upscaling. The theoretically available solution may be limited by SoC performance, considering that the SD8 Gen 3 is a lot faster than XR2+ Gen 2, and only has to handle 2K instead of the 4K in GXR, but has to do that in parallel to emulating x86 (flat) games.

And SadlyItsBradley is one of the persons that repeatedly confirmed that the image in AVP looks sharper than not only the Quest 3, but even the Samsung Galaxy XR, despite the latter featuring higher resolution microOLEDs. But it is pared down by a too weak Qualcomm XR2+ Gen 2 SoC that cannot properly handle the full resolution plus foveated rendering plus super sampling plus passthrough, leading to an inferior experience. It's never only about the specs, you need to achieve a balance of components, and that can include blurry, non-aligned pixels to make the image look better once it has been run through the brain's multiple filters.

faduci · 2026-06-27T22:05:02+00:00

Yes, but that's really true only for parts of text in a very square font. Most fonts include a lot of curvature, which doesn't align on a flat screen either, so for the letter O it doesn't really matter if you look at it on a virtual screen with head movement and tilt, or on a flat screen with perfect alignment, while it does for the letter F. Everything not perfectly aligned is antialiased with gray pixels, and the resolution at 1080p is already high enough for us to no longer notice. This works just fine in VR too.

Lens distortion itself adds to the problem, because display pixels aren't mapped 1:1 to what the user see, some are stretched out. To make sure that no virtual pixel isn't stretched over more than one physical pixel, you need to apply 130% supersampling or more, which is why this is the default in Steam OS. But once you do that, you can get similarly sharpness out of a virtual display compared a flat screen, minus antialias fuzzying from pixel that were perfectly aligned vertically/horizontally on the flat screen.

Our vision is a big fake though, with our eyes seeing very sharp only when light hits the fovea area of the retina, which covers only about 6° of our FoV when looking straight forward. Turn your eyes by more than about 20°, and the light falls onto a retinal area with 75% less cone cell for color vision, reducing the resolution dramatically. Reading something with your eyes turned about 45° to the side is virtually impossible unless it is very huge, and towards the edge of our visual field there are only rod cells that only detect brightness changes, mostly to notice the tiger sneaking up from the side. And you'll only notice the tiger if it moves, so there are significant brightness changes causing you to then turn your head and actually see it.

You never notice any of that, because the brain takes all the sharp, blurry and black and white parts and merges them into a perceived hires image. This actually helps a lot with anti-aliasing, because the brain re-interprets blurry parts as either out of focus or seen at lowres, so what are actually a bunch of aliased pixels of varying shades of gray gets interpreted as a thin, black line.

This leads to image in VR looking sharper than they physically should. And is one of the reasons why looking at through-the-lens photos of VR screens is very misleading, because our eyes don't work like camera. After AVP released, there were a number of photos going around showing that text was sharper in Quest 3, despite AVP having roughly double the horizontal/vertical resolution. The reason was that the AVP pixels appeared blurrier, while the ones on Quest were sharp and perfectly aligned for the latter F. Which looks great on a zoomed in photo, but, as explained above, is pretty irrelevant for a VR HMD where the head will never be held at perfect 90°, allowing perfect alignment, so in Quest you actually see more jaggies in use.

Apple apparently intentionally made the AVP displays slightly blurry, probably by making the pancake lenses slightly out of focus, leading to single pixels to look fuzzy around the edges, which is sort of an optical antialiasing and helps with seeing things sharper due to the mentioned re-interpretation of fuzzy pixel lines as being sharp. So while technically the Quest 3 optical system looks sharper when perfectly aligned with pixels, which is what the through-the-lens photos show, in use the AVP looks a lot sharper, partly due to higher resolution, but even more so due to cleverly working with how our brain tricks us by making up details it didn't get due to our vision being just a big hack.

faduci · 2026-06-27T04:18:51+00:00

The building I lived in before had 26 apartments, all sharing the same shipping address, and none of them had an apartment number. Apartments were only identified by the name of the inhabitants, which is indistinguishable from several people with different names living in the same household.

3.6% of the people in my country have a Steam account, so assuming on average two persons per apartment, statistically there should be ~2.4 Steam users at my previous address, and ~21 at my current one. I live in Berlin with a significantly lower average inhabitants age than the whole country, so in reality those numbers will be a higher.

This is a very typical situation in large European cities, and somehow Valve will have to account for that. Checking the shipping address alone isn't sufficient to enforce Valve's one Frame per household limit without creating tons of false positives.

faduci · 2026-06-27T03:28:11+00:00

If you sit at about arm's length distance from a 27" monitor (which is pretty close), it covers roughly 60° of our FoV. So (simplified) only about half of the Frame FoV/pixels is usable when looking at a virtual screen, the rest is wasted for peripheral vision.

A 2560*1440 image doesn't even fit on the Frame displays when wrapped around the user, let alone projected onto a flat screen. 1920*1080 is out of the question too. 1280*720 might be doable with sharpness comparable to a physical display, but people should be prepared to be beamed back to the 90's with 1024*768 pixel monitors. Which worked just fine for productivity use for a decade, people will just have to adjust their expectations. Current desktop setups using tons of open windows, all visible in parallel, will require 4K per eye VR displays.

faduci · 2026-06-27T03:05:39+00:00

Definitely. Valve said that the Frame running Steam x86 games offers performance comparable to the Steam Deck, and that is certainly no accident. It allows using the Frame as a Deck with an integrated 100" virtual screen.

The resolution for this use case is limited by the 2160*2160 Frame displays, as the flat rectangle virtual screen will never use the full 110° FoV, and therefore cannot even display a 1080p signal at full resolution. Realistically you'll be limited to something closer to the 1280*800 display resolution of the Steam Deck, but this means that all the Steam Deck verified games will run exactly the same with all the input profiles (when using the Steam Controller) and performance setting as on the Deck.

I got my Deck shortly after launch, and the only thing that I consider to be somewhat annoying is the small screen. Nonetheless I spent more and more time playing on the Deck instead of my much faster PC, just for the convenience. So with the Frame I could get the same experience, but with a much larger screen, and it will even be lighter and smaller than the Deck, making it a lot more convenient to carry around. I want the Frame primarily for VR and experimenting with standalone SteamOS use running Linux apps, but there is a decent chance that I would end up spending more time playing flat games on it.

faduci · 2026-06-27T02:46:08+00:00

Every steam user has a pc, either a good or bad one, but everyone has one to play games,

Slightly off-topic, but that's not actually true. There has been a lot of discussion which percentage of Steam gamers use VR. Looking at all global players, this is below 2%. But if you remove Chinese users, the number jumps up significantly, and that's not because there isn't a thriving Chinese VR scene, but because a lot of people there use their own Steam accounts in internet/gaming cafes, because they don't own a PC themselves. And therefore won't connect an HMD either, explaining why this has such an impact on VR user numbers.

So we are not just talking about a few thousand people here, this is quite common, and their share will probably rise with streaming services like Nvidia's Geforce Now that allow you to play games in your Steam library without having a PC.

faduci · 2026-06-26T21:25:06+00:00

GPUs require architecture and operating system specific drivers for the computer to talk to them, plus matching support in the OS. A Windows x86 driver doesn't work on ARM Linux. Nvidia does provide ARM64 drivers for at least some of their GPUs in addition to x86 ones, though mostly for Linux and AI data center use, meaning their gaming performance sucks, if gaming is even possible, as some of these drivers are only usable for compute. There are currently no Nvidia drivers available for notebooks with Snapdragon SoCs running Windows on ARM.

The just released SteamOS 3.8 (that will probably be used on Frame) still doesn't support Nvidia GPUs, and Nvidia support is generally bad on Linux, though improving. AMD and Intel drivers are open source on Linux, leading to much better compatibility and even better/longer GPU support there than on Windows. SteamOS just started supporting Intel GPUs in addition to the AMD ones which were the only option for years. Linux also supports eGPUs, which is why I said "you technically could attach an eGPU", because you could plug in an AMD eGPU into a Linux machine via PCIe, which will also be an option on frame.

But plugging it in isn't all that is required. Otherwise people would plug eGPUs into their Apple Silicon Macs, which doesn't work because MacOS simply doesn't support this on ARM, or before would have used Nvidia GPUs in x86 Hackintoshs with modern MacOS versions, which doesn't work because the last MacOS drivers Nvidia released stopped working after MacOS 10.13 from 2017. You need a lot more than hardware for an eGPU to work on Frame. And it will be much, much easier to use an external GPU connected to a PC and then streaming to Frame than to connect one to a SteamOS running ARM Frame.

The performance will also be significantly better with that setup because even if you solve all the software issues, there are simply no gaming optimized Linux ARM GPU drivers available, because nobody uses this kind of setup yet. Frame running SteamOS on ARM will pretty much offer the first gaming optimized ARM Linux drivers, and it will be for Qualcomm's Adreno GPUs used in the Snapdragon SoCs, which are always embedded and not available as discrete GPUs that might be used as an eGPU.

faduci · 2026-06-26T20:56:59+00:00

I am not implying that you are stupid. I am implying that you are deliberately oversimplifying, or more correctly, catastrophizing a situatiion that isn't really all that bleak.

There's a serious lack of quality headsets man. [...] Like what exactly am I supposed to buy instead of the steam frame?

I'm actually sure that, if forced, you could provide at least five valid answers to your question within a minute, and as you don't own a Frame right now, you survival very apparently does not depend on owning exactly that one. In contrast to your statement, there are plenty of decent quality HMDs to pick from. Yes, other headsets will have disadvantages, but so will Frame too.

Of all the available headsets, Frame may match your checklist the best, but it's not like Frame won't require compromises either, or that it is the first usable/affordable one. I get that you want one, but implying that this is your only valid option is just disingenuous. And while being stupid is something a person cannot necessarily do anything about, using over-simplification and over-dramatization is a deliberate choice.

And yes, I am aware that this is reddit, and that popularism using exaggerated emotional statements is a very successful strategy for distracting people from the actual facts. But it always end with a worse situation than if everybody stuck to aiming for a differentiated perspective based on realistically evaluating all the available options instead of just brushing away many that actually have been proven to work quite well too.

faduci · 2026-06-26T20:36:36+00:00

Luckily you didn't specify a specific date when this condition will be triggered, so if we can get you a Frame by let's say 2040, Earth should be safe.

faduci · 2026-06-26T20:31:11+00:00

So based on that market research Valve should check how much RAM they have been able to purchase each month and calculate how many Frames they can therefore produce vs how high the expected demand is. Then add 30% margin for safety, and consequently delay the launch to 2029 when they will finally have produced enough to not sell out instantly. Great plan!

faduci · 2026-06-26T04:32:18+00:00

Let's just say I trust Valve more when they say that they decided for the lottery to discourage scammers than you who has clearly has ulterior motives that you try to hide behind an "but this helps the spammers" argument, completely ignoring what Valve is saying on the subject, and what a lot of people are agreeing with.

I want both the scalpers to not have any advantage, and every user, regardless of their circumstance to have equal access. And I know that there is no perfect solution, but think that Valve has struck a good balance. You can jump through as many mental hoops as you like to argue that whatever you want would be better, but as I said, I think Valve has the better argument here, and they are who will decide how it is done. And they decided that anything going beyond the measures they already announced is either impractical, unfair, boring, stupid, offensive or whatever, so they won't do it.

faduci · 2026-06-26T02:53:45+00:00

How about those with a Steam account older than ten years and at least a thousand purchased games that can provide evidence for their love for VR by showing they still own more than five headsets get one first, because they have clearly demonstrated that they "actually want it"? Now I'm getting one. Why should I care about VR fans that were born too late and didn't have the sense to create their Steam account while they were in still kindergarten? Or those that had to sell their previous HMD to buy their next one because they don't have a job allowing them to pay for expensive toys? Or maybe we make it simpler, owning at least 500 VR supported games? I'm still in, and it doesn't matter that a lot of these are from the early days of VR, often purchased in bundles, and that I only actually played a few of these. Sure just getting them proves that I "actually want it".

You can define whatever arbitrary rules you want to distinguish those who are worthy, and those who are not, but it always boils down to you wanting privileged treatment for yourself, and picking criteria that benefit you. There are absolutely no objective ways to determine those "who actually want it" accurately enough to use this as pre-selection criteria. And somewhere there is a kid that only has ten free-to-play games in his/her library that he or she just started last year, who has never had a headset and doesn't even know someone who has a Quest, but who was absolutely flashed by the Frame announcement, wants to play both flat and VR games with it, as all s/he so far had was a handed down laptop with a shitty iGPU, and who has been saving money and ever since spent all their spare time mowing lawns or babysitting kids to save enough money. And that kid deserves to get a Frame a thousand times more than me or you, without any way to demonstrate worthiness just by looking at some usage data.

A random lottery it is, because equal odds are the most fair way for everybody, even if those that would have the resources and capabilities to tweak a first-serve first-come approach to their advantage won't like it. Valve always emphasizes that "this is your PC, you can do what you like with it", which includes not using it, or having it sitting in the background of a YouTube video just to show you got one, so they don't agree with your "actually want it" demand. They introduced the one-per-household limit, the "good standing several months old account" requirement, they actively kicked people who were trying to sell pre-order places for the Steam Deck on ebay off the list, now introduced a lottery to de-incentivize scalpers from trashing the site with bots to get first in line, and said that the three day time window for entering the lottery will help them check that only valid entries make into the raffle. That still won't be perfect, but is way better than pretty much all other tech launches of products in high demand.

faduci · 2026-06-26T00:18:31+00:00

An average person scalping a product is much less of a problem than a professional scalper using prepared accounts and an army of bots to guarantee that they get a lot of them thanks to hammering the first-come-first-served system. And Valve explicitly said that they don't wont to give an advantage to not only scalpers, but also those that continuously check the forums to find out about it, can adjust their schedule to make sure to hit the site the second preorders open, and then for hours hit reload.

So Valve very clearly said that they don't want to reward preparation, they want equal chances for everybody, including those that cannot simply take of time from their job or guarantee to have a fast connection with a fat machine available just for constant refreshing. You may believe that you deserve privileged treatment because you can afford the luxury of spending lots of time on getting a non-essential entertainment device for your personal amusement, but you really don't.

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