The US is set to make its final penny. The Philadelphia Mint will strike its last batch of one-cent coins on Thursday, after more than 230 years of production. From a report: The coins will remain in circulation but the phase-out has already prompted businesses to start adjusting prices, as they say pennies are becoming harder to find. The government says the move will save money, or as President Donald Trump put it in February when he first announced the plans: "Rip the waste out of our great nation's budget, even if it's a penny at a time."
Pennies, which honour Civil War president Abraham Lincoln and are made of copper-plated zinc, today cost nearly four cents each to make -- more than twice the cost of a decade ago, according to the Treasury Department. It estimates the decision to end production will save about $56 million a year. Officials have argued that the rise of electronic transactions is making the penny, which first went into production in 1793, increasingly moot. The Treasury Department estimates that about 300 billion of the coins will remain in circulation, "far exceeding the amount needed for commerce."
You can think of the just-announced Steam Frame as a wireless VR headset for your PC, or a Steam Deck for your face. But another way to think about it is that Valve is finally entering the mobile realm. The Frame doesn’t just run Windows games on its Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chip — Valve will now support and encourage developers to bring their Android apps to Steam as well.
It’ll try to make some of them first-class citizens, too, Valve engineer Jeremy Selan tells The Verge. “From the user’s perspective, our preference is that they don’t even have to think about it, they just have their titles on Steam, they download them and hit play.”
Valve says the Steam Frame can use the same Android APKs developers already use to bring their apps to phones and Android-based VR headsets such as the Meta Quest — and it’s launching a Steam Frame developer kit program to help put the hardware in developers’ hands.
It sounds like Valve is specifically hoping to attract some of those Meta VR game developers, rather than just any kind of Android app you might find on a tablet or phone. “They’re really VR developers who want to publish their VR content, and they’re porting a mobile VR title where they’re already familiar with how to make those APKs,” says Selan. “They are now free to bring those to Steam, and they’ll just work on this device.”
In terms of performance, Selan suggests it should be excellent because the code is running natively. While Valve’s SteamOS is not Android and needs to use its Proton compatibility layer to make apps feel at home, the Arm code will run on an Arm processor without needing translation first.
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When I ask about Android apps beyond games — and mention how I’d really like to see things like Discord voice chat in Steam, not just Wallpaper Engine — Valve seems a little less sure. “We’ve never disinvited people from doing that,” says Valve’s Lawrence Yang. “We are a games company and we are focused on games, but like you said, there are a lot of things on Steam that are tools, software like Blender for instance.”
Valve is bringing headsets back, and not just for VR! This is the Steam Frame, and it one-ups Meta Quest by playing flat Windows games on its Arm chip too. Kind of like a Steam Deck for your face that gives you a private virtual room! For VR lovers, it cuts the cord and bypasses your busy Wi-Fi with a direct 6GHz link to your PC. Price, local performance, battery all still TBD, though! #steam#valve#steamframe#headset#vr
Selan chimes in, “We don’t have it quite working to show you today, but our intention is to have rich browser integration, so at any point you’ll be able to bring up a browser, have floating windows, all of the multitasking environments you’d expect, so you could certainly go to any website and have those apps present.
“I know there’s a difference between that and what you asked, but we expect that will bridge a lot of that gap.”
Will there be a way to quickly launch those web apps from Steam, and let users turn them into buttons, perhaps? “That’s our hope. I don’t want to promise that for launch, but that’s our hope,” Selan says.
Valve likes to build for the long haul, and I would be surprised if its plans begin and end at Android-based VR games for the Steam Frame. I think this is more likely the tip of the iceberg. For one thing, it’s looking like Google will soon be forced to open up Android to alternative app stores, so Steam might soon be able to easily sell games on phones just like its rival Epic has been trying to do.
In the meanwhile, Gamers Nexus reports that you’ll also be able to sideload Android APKs onto the Steam Frame, too.
But Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais also hints that there’s potential in bringing SteamOS to other devices with Arm chips, at least someday. He tells me he thinks the Steam Frame paves the way for SteamOS to work on “a wider variety of Arm devices,” including laptops, and that Arm obviously has “a lot of potential” in future handhelds.
Clockwise from top left: the Steam Frame, the Steam Machine 2026, the Steam Controller 2026, and a Steam Deck. (Valve Image)
In a surprise Wednesday drop, Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software unveiled three new physical gaming devices intended to work with its digital storefront Steam.
Planned for release in early 2026, the devices are described as new parts of the “Steam Hardware family.” They include the Steam Machine, a small console intended for users’ living rooms; the Steam Frame, a lightweight VR headset; and a new Steam Controller, which features several new interfaces similar to those found on Valve’s Steam Deck.
“We’ve been super happy with the success of Steam Deck, and PC gamers have continued asking for even more ways to play all the great titles in their Steam libraries,” Gabe Newell, president of Valve, said in a press release.
“Our work over the years on other hardware and even more importantly on SteamOS has enabled Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame to do just that,” Newell said.
The Steam Machine is a 6-inch cube that’s designed to fit unobtrusively into a living room or entertainment center. It’s intended to quietly and efficiently run games from your Steam library, with a removable front panel for decorative purposes and an LED so users can readily tell when it’s on or off.
Like the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine runs on a Linux-based operating system that’s built around Steam. If plugged into a monitor and keyboard, it can be used as a standalone PC with a KDE Plasma desktop environment.
The Steam Frame is a standalone virtual reality headset that’s reportedly able to stream any game from users’ Steam library, with full controller input. It’s a PC in its own right, so it can be used by itself, rather than having to be hooked up to a desktop.
Finally, the Steam Controller “shares DNA” with the Steam Deck, and is described by Valve as “high-performance” and “ergonomic,” with magnetic thumbsticks, trackpads, a gyroscope, and buttons on the grips. In addition to being designed for the Steam Machine, the Steam Controller is compatible with PCs and laptops.
Announcing: New @steampowered.com Hardware, coming in 2026:Steam ControllerSteam MachineSteam Frame. Watch our jazzy announcement video and wishlist now: steampowered.com/hardware
Valve’s announcement on Wednesday came roughly 10 minutes after a series of rumors and leaks that went viral in the PC gaming community, apparently spurred by an accidental release by one of Valve’s partner companies.
No announcements were made regarding exact release dates or prices for any of the devices, but Valve did state it hopes to share those details after the first of the year.
This is a full-circle move for Valve, which had previously attempted to break into both the controller and living room markets with similar devices. Previous editions of both the Steam Controller and Steam Machine were released in 2015 and discontinued in 2019. Valve still sells its high-end Valve Index VR system, which first came out in 2019, though it’s out of stock at time of writing.
This is a seemingly strange time for Valve to revisit its hardware divisions, but the Steam Deck’s success seems to have reignited its ambition to reshape the face of PC gaming. Newell has been vocal for years about how he believes Windows is a poor environment for computer games, and Valve has made a number of moves in recent memory that all come back to trying to expand Linux’s presence in the scene. Through that lens, the new 2026 Steam Machine in particular seems like another quiet shot across Microsoft’s bow.
Prolific software blogger, Sean Goedecke, joins us to discuss why he believes software engineers need to be involved in the politics of their organization, how to avoid worry driven development, what is “good taste” in software engineering, where agentic coding will take our industry, why getting the main thing right is so important, and how to get your blog to the top of Hacker News.
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