Tech Brew Ride Home - Valve Takes On Consoles And VR

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Valve is taking on gaming consoles and creating a new type of VR headset, all at the same time. GPT-5 gets “warmer.” Cursor’s new raise means it has 10x’d its valuation in the span of a year. And we’re one step closer to your phone completely replacing your wallet. Valve brings back Steam Machine and Steam Controller — hands-on with Valve's new AMD-based living room gaming hardware (Tom's Hardware) The Steam Frame is a surprising new twist on VR (The Verge) Microsoft to Use OpenAI’s Custom Chip Work to Help In-House Effort (Bloomberg) OpenAI says the brand-new GPT-5.1 is ‘warmer’ and has more ‘personality’ options (The Verge) The AI Coding Startup Favored by Tech CEOs Is Now Worth $29.3 Billion (WSJ) Apple launches Digital ID, a way to carry your passport on your phone for use at TSA checkpoints (TechCrunch) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the TechBrew Ride Home for Thursday, November 13th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Valve is taking on gaming consoles and creating a new type of VR headset all at the same time. GPT5 gets warmer. Curser's new raise means it has 10xed its valuation in the span of a year, and we're one step closer to your phone completely replacing your wallet. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. When your business evolves, so does your risk of data loss. But with Vime, your data is always on the map. Partner with VIME for coverage that keeps you moving and get protection from workloads of all shapes and sizes, even the ones you haven't created yet, so you can stay resilient as you scale. With VIM, it's all good. Get workload coverage that works for your business at VIM.com. That's VEEAM.com. Valve made a bunch of headlines overnight, and I'm kind of going to go and reverse order of importance to tell you about it. First, if you if you'll recall, Steam upended the console gaming world by releasing the Steam deck.

Now, it seems, Valve wants to take over the console gaming world with the new Steam machine, a cube-shaped gaming PC with SteamOS built right in, a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU, and AMD RDNA 3 GPU, and 16 gigabytes of RAM expected in early 2026, quoting Tom's hardware. This is a system meant for living room play, armed with a new semi-custom AMD-Zen4 CPU and AMD RDNA 3 GPU, and it runs SteamOS just like the Steam Deck. In many ways, it's effectively a Steam-based console. Valve claims that this system is six times more powerful than the Steam Deck, though, so it should be a better couch experience than using the Steam Deck dock and playing games at low-resolution.

The company suggests that the Steam Machine can play games in 4K and 65. frames per second, with the caveat that you'll have to rely on AMD's FSR scaling. The PC measures 6.39 by 6.14 by 5.98 inches, almost a cube, without the computer's feet. It's 5.83 inches tall. Most of the computer is on the bottom of the box, with the majority of the space inside taken up by a substantial heat sink and fan. The front of the system features a customizable light bar that you can personalize to indicate system status, such as when it is booting up, downloading games, or updating. The Steam Machines CPU is based on six AMD Zen4 cores, runs up to 4.8 gigahertz and has a 30-watt TDP. The GPU uses AMD's RDNA3

cores and features 28 compute units, 8 gigabytes of GDDR6 V-RM, and a 2.45 gigahertz max-s sustained clock. The CPU is paired with 16 gigabytes of DDR5. Technically, you can upgrade it, but with some RF shielding and an attempt to keep the memory as close as possible to the CPU for signal integrity, it might be a bit of work. There's an integrated 300-watt power supply. Valve says the GPU uses 110 watts, the one valve rep gave a range of 110 to 130 watts, stating that we're still kind of fine-tuning that. While the CPU goes up to 30 watts, the CPU peaks at 4.8 gigahertz. Valve will sell two configurations of the steam machine, and the only difference will be storage. You can get either a 512 gigabyte SSD or a 2-terabyte

SSD. Either way, Valve is using an M2-2-22030 SSD in the system, though there is room to support an M-2280 if you decide to upgrade or replace the drive. There is another way to expand storage, just like on the Steam deck, you can use a micro-SD card. If you were remove the microSD card and place it into a steam deck or a stream frame, more on that in a second, your library will come with you ready to go into other devices. The system supports two displays via HDMI and displayport on the rear. If you add a displayport hub to the rear or use daisy chaining, the system should be able to support more monitors. Valve hasn't provided pricing or an exact release date for the steam machine or steam controller just yet,

though we were told to expect the hardware early next year. Some of that uncertainty is because of a volatile market for computer components, end quote. On to the next news, and actually now that I think about it, I'm not sure which is the more important news. I guess it depends on what you think about VR, because the other news is the new Steam Frame, a VR headset that can stream games from a PC or run Windows and Android games, locally expected to launch in 2026 for under $999. Quoting the Verge.

It's a standalone VR headset with a smartphone caliber arm chip inside that lets you play flat screen Windows games locally off the onboard storage or a micro SD card. But the frame's arguably bigger trick is that it can stream games directly to the headset bypassing your unreliable home Wi-Fi by using a short-range, high-bandwidth wireless dongle that plugs into your gaming PC. And its new controllers are packed with all the buttons and inputs you need for both flat screen games and VR games. The pitch, either locally or over-streaming, you can play every game in your stream library on this lightweight headset, no chord required. I think Valve may be on to something. As I explored an industrial level in Half-Life Alex,

jumping from floor-to-floor and blasting head crabs, I couldn't tell at all that the game was being streamed to me from a nearby PC. I felt like I was playing it through a hardwired connection or natively on the headset itself. The dongle, which comes in the box with the headset, streams your games over 6 gigahertz spectrum. So that's its only job. It means that the experience has low latency, high bandwidth, and lots of robustness. Valve hardware engineer Jeremy Selin tells the verge, when you're streaming to make what you're looking at appear sharp and with low latency, the frame uses a technique valve calls foveated streaming. You might be familiar with foviated rendering,

which in VR enhances what's directly in front of your eyes and lowers the resolution in your peripheral vision to optimize the performance of a headset. With foviated streaming, the frame instead uses its two eye-tracking cameras to make it easier to sling compressed images from your PC. Anywhere the user is looking, we spend as many bits as possible to give them a very high-fidelity, super-high-quality representation of where they're looking, and we've borrowed those bits from everywhere else in the image, Selen says.

It's always on and always active, so game developers don't have to do anything to make it work. The headset checks the position of your eyes more than 80 times a second. At one point, Valve staffers entered a special command that placed a square in front of wherever my eyes were focused. While it was on, I couldn't tell that the bits around the square were lower fidelity, and as I whipped my eyes all over the virtual room, the square kept up without any discernible lag. It was extremely impressive, and it means that depending on your PC, the frame could let you play high-end VR games on a light headset. The frame weighs 440 grams with the headset and battery strap roughly half as much as the approximately 809 gram valve index, which, unlike the frame, also needed to be physically wired to a PC.

Valve's headset is also lighter than the 560-gram PSVR-2 and the 515 gram MetaQuest 3. It's nice to wear right out of the box, too, with an especially plush and silky face cushion and well-balanced counterweight, thanks to the battery being placed in the back of the headstrap. The strap also contains speakers, two per side, valve says, spaced apart so they can cancel out their own vibrations before they affect the headset's positioning sensors. The comfort might come at the cost of performance, though, while it might seem like a steam deck for your face, the frame won't hit steam deck levels of performance and battery when you're playing on its own lightweight arm system.

The frame runs SteamOS on a last-generation phone chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and it has to recompile WindowsX86 game code on the fly using an emulator named Fex to let titles run on Arm. Valve is welcoming Android games into Steam, so you can play on the frame 2, and you'll be able to sideload APKs as well. The company confirmed to gamers Nexus.

And at 21.6 watt hours, the frames battery is about half the capacity of the original Steam Deck, though you can plug any sufficiently powerful USBC battery at 45 watts into the headset to extend its life. Valve is working to make streaming battery life as efficient as possible, Selin says, though playing six hours of Hades 2 over streaming would be, quote, unlikely. Valve is also planning a Steam Frame Verified program like the Steam Deck verified program that adds green checkmarks on the Steam Store pages of games that play well on the Steam Deck with no modifications so you can know which games run well locally. But playing games locally isn't the main

point of the device. It's mostly designed for streaming. Steamframe is a wireless streaming headset first and foremost, designer Lawrence Yang tells the verge. That is what we've optimized a lot of things and a lot of decisions around, not only for hardware, but also in terms of software. Valve isn't sharing a price for the frame yet. The company plans to reveal that in early 2026, and it's only telling us that it's targeting a price that's less than an index, Valve's previous headset, which cost $999. But there are other hints that Valve's new headset won't be as expensive as competitors, end quote. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need,

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Sasha Nadella wants you to know that Microsoft has access to all of OpenAIs custom AI chip work and therefore plans to use that to help develop its own in-house chip. Quoting Bloomberg, as they innovate even at the system level, we get access to all of it, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Sachin Adela said on a podcast appearance when asked about the development of in-house chips. We first want to instantiate what they build for them, but then will extend it. Under a revised agreement between the two companies, Microsoft has access to the chat-GPT makers

models through 2032 and research. search through 2030 or until a panel of experts agrees that artificial general intelligence has been achieved. Microsoft's intellectual property rights exclude OpenAI consumer hardware. OpenAI plans to custom design chips and networking hardware with Broadcom. Microsoft has worked to develop in-house chips, but has seen less success in the effort than cloud rivals such as Alphabet's Google. Microsoft will work with designs from OpenAI and its own team, quote, knowing we have the IP rights, Nadella said on the podcast released Wednesday. hosted by author Dwarcish Patel, end quote.

OpenAI has rolled out GPT 5.1 Instant, which it wants you to know, is warmer and more conversational, and also GPD 5.1 thinking, which they say is easier to understand and faster. The rollout is starting with paid users, quoting the verge. The new models include GPT 5.1 Instant and GPT 5.1 thinking. The former is warmer, more intelligent, and better at following your instructions than its predecessor per an OpenAI release, and the latter is now easier to understand and faster on simple tasks and more persistent on complex ones. Queries will in most cases be auto-matched to the models that may best be able to answer them. The two new models will start rolling out to ChatGPT users this week,

and the old GPT5 models will be available for three months in ChatGPT's legacy models drop-down menu before they disappear. As part of the update, OpenAI also said it would expand its personality presets for the conversational tone of the models. The total list of options now includes default, professional-friendly, candid, quirky, efficient, nerdy, and cynical, per the company's blog post. OpenAI said in a release that it would also debut an experiment for new ways to fine-tune chat GPT's style directly from settings, which some users will begin to be able to access this week. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hyped up the announce of GPD5 in August, the release failed the hype test. Many chat GPT users were left unimpressed, particularly at the incremental improvements and expressed frustration over OpenAI's choice to make it the default model for chat GPT.

There was so much pressure that OpenAI decided it would bring back GPT40 as an option a day after the launch of GPT5. Microsoft, OpenAI's strategic AI partner has also increasingly been looking at rival models from Anthropic after GPT5 failed to raise the bar enough. Anthropics models are now helping power co-pilot researcher, co-pilot GitHub, co-pilot, co-pilot studio, and a new office agent that is able to produce word and PowerPoint documents from Microsoft's own co-pilot chat interface, end quote. AI coding startup cursor just raised $2.3 billion co-led by Asel and Co2 at a $29.3 billion

valuation. This is after raising a $900 million series C at $9.9 billion in valuation just back in June. And also, if my math is correct, that means they are now worth 10 times more than their valuation at the beginning of the year. Quoting the journal. Other new investors include Alphabet's Google and Invidia, which Cursor invited to the round quote to deepen the partnership, said Michael Truel, co-founder and chief executive officer of the startup in an interview. Google provides artificial intelligence services and cloud computing to the startup,

while Nvidia is an enterprise customer. NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang has given high praise to the startup in recent public appearances. Cursor has rebuffed acquisition interests from a number of major AI companies, according to people familiar with the matter. In late October, the company launched its new AI model called Composer. The model could eventually become an opportunity for the company to reduce its dependency on third-party models and keep more of its revenue, but for now, the main goal is simply to continue adding more users to its product, investors said. As the biggest AI model builders continue to grow in size and in product development, investors and founders are looking to cursor to see if a startup can successfully build an independent company

on top of the models from OpenAI Anthropic and others. We're excited to be one of the first examples of a large company built on their platforms, says Truel. He added that the relationships between Cursor and the AI model companies is Sympatico. All of the AI labs are important partners to us, he said, and quote. Finally today, news you can use. Apple has officially launched Digital ID inside Apple Wallet, letting iPhone and Apple Watch owners in the U.S.

carry a copy of their passport, which can be used at some TSA checkpoints, coding TechCrunch. The new feature can be used at TSA checkpoints across more than 250 U.S. airports when traveling domestically. Using digital ID and Apple wallet users can create and present an ID, even if they don't have a real ID compliant driver's license or state ID. The ID does not replace a physical passport, and it's not currently supported for international travel or crossing borders, Apple Notes. Users can add their passport to wallet by tapping on the add button in the wallet app, then selecting driver's license or ID cards. From there, select digital ID and follow the steps to complete the setup process, which includes using the iPhone to scan the photo page of their passport and scanning the chip

embedded on the back to ensure the passport's authenticity. Users will also have to take a selfie for verification and then complete a series of facial and head movements for additional security. Presenting Apple's new digital ID in person works pretty much. like using Apple Pay. You can double-click the side button or home button to access your wallet, then select Digital ID. The iPhone or Apple Watch should be held near an identity reader, and users will use Face ID or Touch ID to authenticate their information. Users will also be able to see what identity information is being requested before completing the verification process.

The feature is still in beta, as it hasn't fully rolled out to all the device readers at the TSA checkpoints at this time. The TSA website offers a list of which state. are currently supporting mobile ID, but still advises travelers to carry their physical ID. Apple says that users will eventually be able to present their digital ID at businesses and organizations where they need to verify their age, both in person and online. This could include event venues or bars where users need to present their ID at the door to verify if they're of drinking age. Online, websites that restrict content to adults could also leverage Apple's APIs to verify

users' ages. For instance, if a user wanted to order alcohol for delivery through a service like Uber Eats, They could verify their ID during the ordering process, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly, big board buck slot machine by aristocrat gaming,

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