I just think that phones and specially old ones are quite bad at being repurposed, its hard to work with them when they were purposely engineered that way. You will have much better results with an old pc desktops or pc notebook. Some may even be as performant as the steam machine, just don't expect low power usage and something small and good looking for the living room, a sore point in pc desktops that the steam machine tries to address.
We got that part, they’re good points
At what point does the value proposition go back, for the target audience you are fond of and can imagine to be disinterested in both consoles and enthusiasts uses of old phones
That was the premise of this thread, the price point of consoles and a generally antiquated understanding of current gen console indie gaming libraries