Posted by Ariarule 6 hours ago
There were news/rumours that it was originally designed for Magic Leap 2 and Valve got the leftovers for cheap: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/steam-decks-... .
If they're going to spend a premium on ordering a new batch, they might as well order the APU for the OLED model they charge full price right?
I already did a lot of research on the device, plus i have over a thousand games in my Steam library, so this made it a very logical purchase. I ordered a 1TB disk from Amazon and installed within 15 minutes thanks to the IFixit documentation.
It’s a very versatile piece of hardware if you want it to be. Game emulation is very easy. Open Office and Kodi work flawlessly. HDMI output can be done with a cheap chinese adapter. Bluetooth takes care of other devices.
It’s BIOS is pretty easy and can boot from almost any device you can connect via the USB-C port.
Even running Windows 11 is possible, because Valve supplies the drivers for it. I tried it just for fun. How to reinstall the (Arch) Steam OS is well documented.
My kids love playing Lego City on it. I love playing Beat Hazard 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim and The Witcher 3 on it.
Will i buy the Steam Machine? Depends on the cost and it’s possibilities. If it can run streaming media like Netflix easily, it could make a very interesting replacement for the current media pc we’re using.
Going off a tangent but LibreOffice should be preferred as most OpenOffice contributors moved to LibreOffice following the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.
By cutting the LCD, particularly the 256GB model, Valve avoids internal competition where their "budget" option cannibalizes sales of their premium OLED units, which offer a much better user experience.
furthermore, with whispers of new hardware like the "Steam Frame" or a revamped "Steam Machine," Valve needs to clear the stage. The LCD Deck served its purpose as a pioneer, but keeping it alive indefinitely dilutes the brand's focus.
For consumers, it’s a double-edged sword; we lose the most affordable entry point into PC handheld gaming, but we gain a clearer, more unified path forward. Ultimately, this move signals that Valve is confident the OLED is the new standard, and they are aggressively pivoting resources toward whatever comes next.
The china's supply chain will let it be, what about you?
I don’t have any data to support this, but I suspect a sizable segment of PC gamers aren’t going to view this as the impetus they needed to splurge on the OLED. I doubt very many of those people see this as a double-edged sword. It doesn’t particularly matter to them what Valve’s confidence in the product is if they can’t afford to buy one. While some may buy the step-up model, many won’t. Valve loses out on the sale of the hardware and on the sale of the software to run on it. And I’d be concerned that ceding the lower end of the market is going to poison the well like video game consoles in the early 80s.
With that said, Valve almost certainly has the data and would know better than me. It seems like a gamble to me. Maybe the post is correct and this is all about price anchoring for the new Steam Machine and Frame.
It is very much apparant I'm not Steam's ideal customer, but I'm happy I got it for about $249'ish? I hemmed and hawed alot thinking why am I buying a hand held pc for gaming but the switch 2 was sold out/to much work to reserve so I went for it and am really happy I did.
All this hubbub about chip shortages has me wondering if it's going to extend the lifespan of these devices. Already in the Legion Go line, its successors are much more expensive but not much more performant. The line bifurcated into an entry level and a premium option, and both have a variant whose chip is derived from the same 7840 as the original model. That is, the Legion Go S and Legion Go 2 are both priced higher than the original, with a lower screen resolution and identical (or nearly identical) chipset. The only reason to choose one over the original is if you really need that extra RAM.
Like the Steam Deck, the Legion Go is still a perfectly serviceable device years later. The Deck competitors from Lenovo, ASUS, OneX, AYANEO, etc. are all built around basically the same chip that's a bit stronger but less power efficient than the Deck. The performance envelope hasn't really moved.
Tariffs and part shortages are making these devices a lot more expensive, but they aren't noticeably better than they were 2 years ago. In fact, Valve's upcoming Steam Machine has very similar specs, and was designed to outperform 70% of the devices currently gaming on Steam.
If prices are going up and performance is stagnating, people who already have gaming devices are going to be reluctant to upgrade. I expect these market forces are going to extend the lifespan of current-gen devices.
Most games take years to make. I wonder how many games currently in the production pipeline were banking on players having more performance available by the time the games are released, and how that is going to impact their reception.
The Steam Deck has been a really useful performance-and-feature anchor for computer gaming. Until hardware improves enough to justify a Steam Deck 2, I expect it will continue to maintain that position, improving the playable lifespan of all the other gaming devices in the market too.
SteamOS is probably the most commercially well-supported consumer desktop Linux, but it's still primarily a games storefront. If you only want to do desktop stuff, you're probably better off either on the Chromebook/Android train, or putting a community-supported distro on whatever hardware you've got.