Valve won't be releasing a Steam Deck with more performance until at least 2025. Given the smartphone market's reputation for disappointing incremental updates, this is the right choice. Valve should, however, throw gamers a bone with a Steam Deck 1.5.
TLDR: current hardware developments compared to original steam deck wouldn’t allow for significant upgrades with the same level of experience, but they should release a flashy sidegrade like oled switch
While there is little to debate on the first part, I disagree with the second half. Even these little sidegrades usually carry minor hardware differences (the switch itself is just “the switch” but if you ever took interest in modding it you know that there are a lot of generations, all different). One of the greatest features of the deck is that there is just the deck, every deck in existence has the same exact hardware save for bigger storage and slightly different screen finish - underneath a deck is a deck is a deck.
I never want to read “this issue affects steam deck gen2”.
The deck has had a decent number of minor hardware revisions. They’ve improved some of the buttons, added foam strips to the fan to reduce whine, downgraded the SSDs, replaced the heat shield with a brand new design, etc.
Not to mention they’ve supplied different components through different companies, so you have multiple types of fans and joysticks due to that.
Which is all entirely normal and actually respectable that a company does this over the life of the device. Rather than have some stupid marketing gimmick to have you buy the new one they just improve it under the hood. The alternative is similar to how Nintendo is just keeping the same exact shitty hardware and broken joycons and then marketing the gimmicky OLED edition with different hardware
Pretty sure 2 was the sad was downgraded as a component to one that supports less lanes, but still supports what the deck supports so it’s no performance difference. The other parts were also just pulling similar components from different sources and all hardware makers do it to have continuous supply or reduce production costs.
TLDR: current hardware developments compared to original steam deck wouldn’t allow for significant upgrades with the same level of experience, but they should release a flashy sidegrade like oled switch
While there is little to debate on the first part, I disagree with the second half. Even these little sidegrades usually carry minor hardware differences (the switch itself is just “the switch” but if you ever took interest in modding it you know that there are a lot of generations, all different). One of the greatest features of the deck is that there is just the deck, every deck in existence has the same exact hardware save for bigger storage and slightly different screen finish - underneath a deck is a deck is a deck.
I never want to read “this issue affects steam deck gen2”.
The deck has had a decent number of minor hardware revisions. They’ve improved some of the buttons, added foam strips to the fan to reduce whine, downgraded the SSDs, replaced the heat shield with a brand new design, etc.
Not to mention they’ve supplied different components through different companies, so you have multiple types of fans and joysticks due to that.
Which is all entirely normal and actually respectable that a company does this over the life of the device. Rather than have some stupid marketing gimmick to have you buy the new one they just improve it under the hood. The alternative is similar to how Nintendo is just keeping the same exact shitty hardware and broken joycons and then marketing the gimmicky OLED edition with different hardware
Not entirely true that every deck is the same.
Outside of storage configurations/screen etching, there are some obvious and less obvious differences:
I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what I can recall from keeping on top of the news.
Pretty sure 2 was the sad was downgraded as a component to one that supports less lanes, but still supports what the deck supports so it’s no performance difference. The other parts were also just pulling similar components from different sources and all hardware makers do it to have continuous supply or reduce production costs.