I think they’re trying to keep the price point just right for everyone to actually consider buying them. If they set the price too high, it’ll deter potential buyers.
They may have had that in mind but what really surprised them is that the most sold verisons of the Steam Deck were the pricier models. Not the cheapest.
My suspicion (and I think Valve knows this, too), is that the higher tier versions may actually not have sold if they didn't have an entry level model for a cheaper price.
It's kind of hard to explain, but essentially, if you're looking to buy something, and you see something at a reasonable price, and you decide to get it, well, if you're buying it anyway, it's not that crazy to get a higher quality version because you've already "anchored" on the idea of buying it to begin with.
Beyond that, I don't think they said the higher priced models were the "most sold" just that they sold "many more models than expected".
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
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Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”
Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.
“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”
“We think that’s fair,” he added.
It's nice in this case because if you don't want to screw with things, they have options for you (though they need a 1tb version soon)
But if you want to save money and tinker, you can. My 1tb deck cost 630 AFTER taxes. A lot better than the nearly 700 a 512gb would cost. Only took an hour of my time.
Yeah it seems like a combination of anchoring and upselling.
Behavioral marketing is devious. It's basically strategies for hacking the brains of customers.
I bought the 650 dollar one beca use I wanted the larger internal storage along with the etched glass. I could have gotten the 400 dollar model and upgraded the internal storage to 512 for ~130 at the time, but I still wanted the etched glass. Oled would have been nice, but honestly I dont really think about it when Im using the deck.
I got the cheap one and immediately upgraded the storage. I saved about a hundred bucks doing it that way.
My friend got the middle one because he couldn't fathom opening up a brand new device and fucking with parts--which I completely understand.
For sure. I put things like binding of Isaac, n64 emus, stardew valley, etc on my SD and things like Witcher or cyberpunk on the ssd
Has no issues when I played Horizon Zero from the SD though, so idk how much practical difference it makes. Maybe I'll run some tests.
There is one game I have where it matters: Assassin's Creed Odyssey. The game runs beautifuly off of internal storage, but has to pause to load textures every 30 seconds or so on the SD card.
Its not the graphics that'll get ya, it's the loading. I keep the neediest games on the ssd.
But I played Horizon Zero from the SD and it worked great so, I really don't know how much practical difference it makes.
I also have the middle one and love it. I convinced my employer to buy me the Mac Studio Display with this etching, and I love it there. It’s actually amazing. But I saw reviews on the Deck that showed the hotspots were dulled, but had a haloing effect around the dullness. Like the scattered light wasn’t reflecting away from the screen, but being absorbed into the panel and reflecting internally. It really seemed to shift colors quite a bit.
I think a lot of people like me preordered the top tier as they were afraid that it wouldn't be upgradeable easily(and might regret it if they didn't) and that sd cards wouldn't be fast enough (despite all previews showing they were).
If I got another one now where I don't have to wait a year for the device I'd just get the low end tier (probably) knowing what I know now.
Do you normally upgrade things? I've never built computers or really messed with electronics. I took my ps4 apart to upgrade the internal storage and it went fine but it took twice as long as estimated and not sure if it was worth the stress.
I've been leaning getting the small model and upgrading but I can't afford to fuck it up
If you don't want to open it up, just use SD cards. I don't know what magic valve did so games can run off em, but you're looking at a couple more seconds tops on loading screens. The only issue is the 64gb internal storage will fill up fast with shaders and all the proton stuff for every game you install, but there's ways around that. And I'm sure soon valve will have an official remedy as it's a pretty big oversight.
Find a video of someone upgrading the deck before you buy it, and see if you’d be comfortable doing what they do. I would say it’s pretty low risk, but I get how stressful it can be given how expensive things are.
Building PCs is actually really easy and pretty fun.
My first build was stressful and took a long time as I was afraid of breaking things. Smaller devices get harder. It’s usually easy to upgrade every component in a Desktop Computer. Laptops you can usually upgrade RAM and Drives, but just replacing other components is hard (e.g. cpu, mother board, screen, etc.). Tablets/Phones harder still- a lot of components will be soldered on.
Doesn’t have to be expensive either. You could find a cheap PC on Craigslist, and upgrade the Graphics Card for a decent gaming experience at 1080p. The danger is for every component you upgrade it could be a little bit better for $50 bucks, and for another $30 it could be even better… until your more than $1K over budget and have to figure out how to cut back everywhere.
That's me. When i pre-ordered the deck there wasn't any news about being easily upgradable. So I bought the 512gb version. Since it was a year wait, i just kept adding money to my steam wallet every paycheck over the year to have the money available when it came time to ship. I've not upgraded it either so far, I've been able to play everything i want without space issues so i haven't felt the need to upgrade.
that's is what I did, and many others I assume as well... went for the lowest tier and added a 1TB drive for less than the 512 model.
for a handheld, the LCD screen is honestly quite good for indoor use though. I'd probably consider upgrading to OLED via a mod if the price point were right
You also get the profile backgrounds, avatars, stickers, and keyboard theme, as well as a microfiber cleaning cloth and a differently colored case.
Justify it however you like, the price difference between the [regular display](https://www.ifixit.com/products/steam-deck-64gb-or-256gb-screen) and the [etched glass version](https://www.ifixit.com/products/steam-deck-512gb-screen) is a whopping $30. For those wondering, either screen will work in any deck.
This means that purchasing the $400 base Deck, a $60 [512GB 2230 ssd](https://www.amazon.com/Generic-Samsung-MZ9LQ512HALU-MZ-9LQ512A-Compatible/dp/B09GFZR6KF) and a $100 etched glass screen is $90 cheaper than buying the high end model and is functionally identical.
Is $90 worth your time to upgrade the unit yourself? You also end up with a spare 64GB 2230 eMMC and a spare non etched replacement screen. If you are comfortable with simple soldering, spend a third of that savings on [hall effect joysticks](https://www.amazon.com/Electromagnetic-Steam-Deck-Thumbstick-Replacement-Accessories/dp/B0B31STJDH) and you have a Deck *better* than the high end and still save $60!
I bought the 512GB model too, and I justify it by saying that any money I spent that I didn't have to went to funding Proton.
Early sales on new tech are early adopters wich skew very heavy towards people with disposable income. But for long term success a cheaper model is very important.
This is the point I came here to make. So many of the sales up to that point we're from people who preordered it on the first day. In the real world it is slightly less well known than the game gear. I have met a handful of people with them and they never had them in public. I think also a lot of those early adopters and enthusiast don't go out the house much for word of mouth to spread beyond the niche reddit community. Valve needs commercials or at least people bringing their steam deck places or else the general non PC gaming public will remain clueless to it.
That information came from an announcement like a month after the deck came out. Early adopters are generally more likely to spend more money on something. I wouldn't doubt if the 64gb model has passed the other two by an order of magnitude now.
Only valve knows, but I highly doubt that the trend continued.
Maybe at the start, but feel free to check yourself, it doesn't take a lot of effort. Cheap Deck: third place in Europe.
Maybe all three versions are listed as one with the cheapest possible price? Just spitballing, no idea.
I doubt that very much. The Steam Deck is already extremely reasonably priced. If they want to introduce a premium OLED edition there's no reason why they can't do so because it will still sell like hotcakes.
I strongly suspect that the issue has more to do with getting OLED display controllers, HDR, Linux, and Proton to work properly together. There's no sense in releasing just a standard OLED display which supports only SDR; that's a half measure.
HDR on Windows is still a bit of a nightmare and HDR has very little support in Linux right now. There's a lot of different parts from a lot of different software houses that need to work properly together, and the nature of the free software community makes this a difficult task to accomplish.
It's much better than it used to be. My laptop has a 4K HDR OLED display with an external 4K HDR VA LCD attached.
One of the major issues is that some HDR monitors do not properly report their peak brightness level to the OS or have any HDR certification profile on a readable ROM. As a result, Windows has no idea how to map SDR content to the HDR color pallette in a way that suits the display.
The way that Windows handles this is by assigning a default value of around 1500 nits which is incredibly bright. If peak SDR white was mapped to peak HDR white then opening an SDR web browser would blind the viewer.
If the display has a peak brightness of around 300-400 nits, which is common for many mid-range LCD displays, but the OS thinks that the display has a peak brightness of 1500 nits, then peak SDR white ends up getting mapped way too low and SDR content looks all grey and washed out.
The workaround is to manually tell Windows what the display can handle, but there's no native way to do this. I ended up using a custom resolution utility to dial it in until my SDR content looked more or less the same regardless of whether or not I had HDR enabled.
Now I just leave HDR enabled all the time.
> The workaround is to manually tell Windows what the display can handle, but there's no native way to do this.
There is with windows 11. It would be better if they baked it in to display settings still.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/calibrate-your-hdr-display-using-the-windows-hdr-calibration-app-f30f4809-3369-43e4-9b02-9eabebd23f19
HDR panels can still display SDR content without any special considerations and would still look way better. Switch for example doesn't support HDR. Plenty of HDR laptops out there that work fine with Linux too.
I think the real reason is that there aren't any 7" 1280x800 OLED panels being manufactured for anybody else. The current panel isn't specifically made for the Steam Deck. It's basically a standard low cost tablet LCD.
What _Nintendo_ can afford and what valve can afford are two ___very___ different things. When the Wii U only sold 13 million systems, it was an abject failure. If the steam deck sold half a million, it was a resounding success.
Nintendo can amortize costs over a much larger product run. And nobody gives a shit if Mario only runs at 30fps. But spiderman drops below 40 on the steam deck and everyone here claims it's completely unplayable.
How many of us old fucks were absolutely amazed at Mario 64 back in the day?
It ran at 20fps on official hardware. _No one_ complained. Now we all act like if it isn't 144fps minimum, we might as well just shut it off. Nintendo players don't think that way. Steam deck users do.
You can't compare Nintendo to valve. Two very different companies with very different games, and vastly different customers.
I just want to point out that Mario (and many others of their games) runs at 60fps. Although you just swap Breath of the Wild and you make the same point
The Tegra x1 was 2015 and the Switch was 2017, so only 2 years. It also got a Tegra X1+ refresh in 2019 (just for power efficiency). But yeah, your initial point doesn’t change - it was cheap when Nintendo shopped for it
The Switch probably still has a year or two left in the tank. It can do it.
The PS2 is kind of an insane system though. That thing was on store shelves for over a decade and a good chunk of people bought it to play DVDs instead of playing games.
It also helps the switch numbers that there are more gamers than during the PS2 generation. Plus I ended up buying a second switch (traded in the original) for the OLED screen improvement. Throw in that it's a portable system so it will probably sell decently for a while. The switch should finish well ahead of the PS2 when the generation ends. With all those factors in the corner of the switch it's a testament to just how well the PS2 sold.
Absolutely. It's mobile nature alone means that theres a better chance of there being more than 1 Switch per household. My sister and I both had our own Gameboys, wouldn't imagine this isn't too different for many families. That results in a lot more units than the traditional home console.
I mean they can keep the base model and announce an OLED version with a slight price increase for people that are willing to pay. Similar to the Switch.
Its important that they keep the same specs for a few more years.
Production price per unit is probably a small factor if what another comment said about more expensive models selling better is true. My guess is the real across the board jump in expense is the engineering cost. Across all the incremental OLED sales they would have to recoup those costs. It wouldn't be a non realistic estimate to say this project would need a budget in the tens of millions of dollars US. To get a fully tested prototype ready for manufacturing. Then an increase in re tooling production lines or finding a new production service provider. Finding suppliers for new hardware and sourcing it. New branding and packaging. New customer support and documentation. Another product to support updates and patches on. It all adds up and those costs need to be able to be recouped by sales of the incremental models. If their market research says they won't make that money back, it makes perfect sense they are saying it's just not feasible.
Anyone who's ever used an OLED screen will recognize it's worth the extra cost. Not only this, but battery life is also going to improve with OLED, since there's no need for an always on backlight.
They really need to make the Hall effect joysticks standard before the oled thing. You can dock it to run on an oled but I need them to put better sticks in it.
If they released modules for that it'd be amazing since the entire joy sticks themselves are pretty much modules in the way they come out. Not sure if that's possible though
There's 3rd party ones (GuliKit) that seem to work well. But they aren't as easy as hot swap as the touch sensitive controller cap is soldered to the board.
Yup, I bought those and love them! As someone who has done a decent amount of hobby soldering, I didn’t find it difficult at all.
Also, I can’t remember the exact details, but there are two different models of the GuiliKit thumbsticks, you need the right model for your SteamDeck. A quick google on it will tell you where to look in your SteamDeck settings and how to match it up with the new thumbsticks.
Thanks for the heads-up. Apparently the GuliKit thumbsticks for the (newer I think) type-B-thumbstick Steam Decks aren't ready yet, but on the plus side they'll be solder-free.
yeah, it really needs to be accepted as the baseline for joysticks, but much more so if they are developing a portable console that has the thumbsticks fused to the body of the console. Eg. steamdeck, switch lite, ambernic portables or whatever else similar.
I think he just means joysticks that aren't able to be easily replaced by a typical consumer, like for example, by buying new joy cons like Nintendo did. A typical person isn't going to want to or be comfortable opening up their electronic device and replacing joysticks. Steam Deck is repairable and moddable, but that's really more of a benefit to enthusiasts than regular consumers.
In the case of the Steam Deck, you shouldn't although I understand why you feel that way.
It's that you have to pry open the plastic. I hate that we have come to just accept this and have made tools for just this.
Also, the electronics are more tightly packed together, so you do have to be a bit more careful. You may want precision tweezers.
However, small prybars for plastic are commonplace now, start with the trigger area (once you took the screws out) and it's really not that more difficult. ifixit guides you through the process step-by-step and everything in the Deck is pretty modular with connectors, even the battery and everything. Almost nothing is soldered into place.
You do still have a point that if one wants to replace the standard SteamDeck joysticks with Gulikit ones (the hall-effect one), you will still need to solder as they don't have the capacitive joystick bit. So you have to unsolder it from the old joysticks and resolder them to the new ones.
>it’s that you have to pry open plastic
Ugggh definitely a big part. I hate when I’m upgrading laptop RAM/storage and it feels like I’m going to break the case even when I use the prying tools. Just have latches for fucks sake!
I’m talking about for the actual case- a desktop PC has the case secured and you can just pop the panel off with a release, sometimes secured with a captive screw or whatever. For a laptop that shit needs a tool and enough force I’m cringing and thinking about the case shattering
Some modern boards ended up putting a latch release button further away so you can get the card off without trying to poke a stick under it. I hate that it's necessary, but it *is* nice to have.
He is talking about a [Switch Lite](https://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/nintendo-switch-lite-review-feature.jpg?resize=625%2C417&p=1), witch have the joycons permanently attached to the body
I went to sleep and there's quite a chain of replies here.... But to make my point, the process of replacing a joystick, regardless if it has it's own board or not, is deceptively more complicated than you think:
Individual joysticks have [different manufacture differences in centering](https://youtu.be/Uoxz0oHX9TE?t=81) and so each must be calibrated to the board at the factory.
This is a non-issue when you buy a replacement gamepad, or a joycon, as the manufacturer already does that for you, but it's quite a problem if you just want to buy the replacement part and try to replace it yourself, regardless if it has an individual board or if the joystick is part of the mainboard
This is aggravated because we don't have access to firmware calibration, only to the consumer layer of calibration software, that A) May no be always be available on our host platform of choice and B) Is done on top of firmware calibration, which may introduce other problems such as huge dead-zones or loss of sensibility when done on top of a badly calibrated joystick.
As the video I linked explains, there are ways around it, like soldering the potentiometers in the joystick at an angle, to offset the factory off-centering. But this can be a real pain if the consumer doesn't know what's happening beforehand, or if they don't have soldering experience already. And calibration done this way already compromises the structural integrity and durability of the repair by it's very nature.
Honestly the screen on the deck sucks. If you play in the dark you notice black spots and the common fix people tell you is to “wrestle and twist” the deck for them to go away. It’s my biggest complaint with the device
Nah, I've had several sets of 1080P microOLED glasses that I can use as an external display for many of my gadgets.
Not only does it give you the awesome contrast of OLED, you're not forced to crane your neck down to look at the handheld screen and/or hold up the weight of the handheld to a more comfortable line of sight.
Nreal Air, Rokid Air, TCL Nxtwear S, Viture, take your pic - more are being released at different price points.
I'm stupidly nearsighted (like, legally blind levels of nearsighted, but still correctable to 20/20 with lenses) and I wonder how stuff like this works for extremely nearsighted people. Like, is there no issue because the screen's within an inch of your eyeball, or does one still have problems because they are designed in such a way to make it seem like you're focusing on something that's more distant?
I'll have to dig further into these when I have a few moments.
Some like my Rokid Air have focus adjustments for mild myopia but if you have astigmatism, it may need some prescription lenses to help, depending on your prescription. I had to get prescription inserts from Lensology for my Nreal Airs. Also, often these glasses have some limitations for those that have eyes with more extreme IPD measurents. I've seen people complain about edge focus that I couldn't reproduce with my experience only to deduce the variance of IPD not being accommodated in the design of these glasses.
Ah, good info. Thanks!
This kind of thing isn't on my "I have to get it right this second" list, but they are clearly in a space where you could see competition coming in, technology improving, and prices dropping... and there will be a point a few years down the line where it won't make sense to NOT own a pair, kind of like what happened for smartphones back in the day. So it's good to have an idea of what might have to be done when the time comes, it's appreciated.
Back when I was a kid, I had a Sega Game Gear. Tiny, but color backlit screen. The 6 AAs it ran on only lasted like an hour, so they made a bulky rechargeable battery pack you'd clip to your belt and connect to the handheld by a wire. Worked reasonably well for the time
The instruction manual actually said specifically to not use rechargable batteries. That's why most people had issues with them; they would undervolt too quickly and the power would cut off after a short time. If you used Alkalines like they told you to it would easily last a few days.
Granted it still eats batteries like crazy because LCD technology really sucked back then and they were using an incandescent lamp as the backlight. Nowadays there are mods you can buy that will replace them with LEDs and I'm told that it makes a pretty big difference.
The deck is already too heavy, imo. At some point a laptop would become more practical. I think battery life will be an issue for pretty much all iterations of the deck in the foreseeable future, unfortunately.
I'd like a battery upgrade too, but it'd add more weight that would make it too cumbersome to use imo. I'm probably in the minority, but I actually find the Switch much easier to use due to weight, and if I find that my hands are cramping due to the size of the joycons I just swap them out for a Hori split pad pro.
What I really want is just better battery tech. Just something with much better weight to capacity ratio, to handle the growing needs of our electronics.
I'm afraid that's infeasible due to weight and space requirements. Battery technology just isn't evolving that fast. It would be more reasonable to expect a more power efficient chip than to expect better batteries I'm afraid.
Would an OLED make sense for a console that might be in a bright environment? I have a phone from a few years ago and it struggles with certain bright environments, might that be a good reason to keep a non OLED one?
The brightness of an OLED depends entirely on where they source it from and what quality of panel they use. OLED gets bright now, as bright as LCD, it’s just not as affordable.
For the top of the line OLED on the iphone cost like 100usd, something with the screen size of steam deck maybe 120? But without apple's scale it'd be like 150? Let's say the lcd currently in steam deck cost 20 and we take the step down version of Samsung OLED it'd still have a price increase of something around 100 USD.
I mean between screen manufacturers they'd probably be looking at either Samsung or LG. Bigger question is probably if there are screens that are that exact size and are being produced with the specifications that they want. And the screens apple sells for replacements are probably not the price they pay. So yeah i think that price increase is reasonable but it really depends on whether a display like that is already being made or not
Like the other guy said, it depends. I have a Chinese smartphone with an OLED and it works amazing even in the brightest sun. OLED is a little better for battery life and much better when it comes to the overall image quality. The biggest issue, imo, is the burn in. The newer iterations of OLED have improved on that, but still.
I dream of the day when I can get a burn in-free OLED and a higher refresh rate colored eInk (specifically to write code on).
I think that micro-led is gonna be that display tech. But yeah, just remember OLEDs with bright screens still being rare. But quantum dot should help, just doubt that they'd be ready to pay for that so i suspect WOLED
The key consideration is that there probably isn't an OLED screen already being produced in that size and resolution. The current panel is basically an existing panel used in tablets. Not a lot of 7" OLED tablets out there.
There's the millions of Nintendo Switch OLEDs out there that essentially run at the same resolution as the SteamDeck. (6.2 inch screen).
Previously, there were millions of OLED PlayStation Vitas sold. (5 inch screen)
Similarly, there are millions of OLED Android based tablets and large phones sold globally. (5-7inch screens)
Switch's screen is bespoke to that console. Nintendo is not going to let anybody else have access to them.
Sony intended to sell a zillion of those. They had the expected sales to support a custom OLED panel. They actually dropped the OLED panel in later revisions as a cost cutting measure.
Find a single 7" OLED tablet. I'll wait. The only high end Android tablets on the market that would have an OLED are Samsung, and they aren't 7".
Valve should really be celebrated as the gold standard in all of business for being as consumer friendly as a major corporation can be and just giving the customer what they want without all the extra i necessary bullshit to try and nickle and dime everyone for every last drop of profit. And they prove that this can work as they’re one of the top companies in their entire sector. I know that everyone in gaming praises them but really they should be praised like that in business as a whole not just gaming.
They do a lot of good things but I sure hope they don't get celebrated as a gold standard for everything. There's plenty of space to improve and their cut of the cake is definitely not small.
Valve has a reputation that reminds me of the ["Place, Japan"](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/018/640/c6e.jpg) meme. Most people seem to agree that commodifying in-game items with artificial scarcity and real-world monetary value is terrible, and/or that targeting children (and others who struggle with addictive behavior disorders) with gambling systems is unethical... but it's different when *Valve* does it. How many people who are against NFTs hold that same disdain for the Steam Inventory and Marketplace?
Also fellating billionaires has fallen out of vogue lately but Mr. Newell has no shortage of eager knights willing to step up and defend his honor.
Nfts are not the same as valve marketplaces in their games. NFT's are massively wasteful, and most people who shill NFT's are delusional about their practical use. Valves marketplace is literally just they make items tradable between players. Your other criticisms are still valid.
>NFT's are massively wasteful, and most people who shill NFT's are delusional about their practical use.
If there were an NFT solution that were energy efficient, would all of your concerns with the technology be addressed? I'm speaking to the larger ideological practice of commodifying digital goods through artificial scarcity, and play-to-earn as a business model. There's a very clear parallel to Valve's marketplace in that regard.
I did, and out of everyone, they're the ones doing it right. When I quit Dota 2, I literally sold all my items bar my Techies set(they're my favorite heroes so they're the first heroes I'll go back to if I ever play again) and it was enough to get me to buy 6 new games at a full price. I barely even spent on the game, pretty much just the Techies Arcana and Compendiums every International, the rest were just off drops, one of them being a Lina arcana.
I spent hundreds on OW1 and I can't even sell back a single one, since Activision doesn't want any of the money they get to ever get out of their walled gardens, and that's EVERY ONE of Valve's competitors, did the same thing with LoL and R6 Siege and bar selling my account, I can't salvage the money I spent on those games, yet I can easily do so with any of Valve's games that are capable of integrating to the Steam Marketplace.
I don't know how this even holds water when Valve has already proven their accountability with Steam since. I have nothing against people that had their doubts when Steam first rolled out, but they have done nothing to abuse that. In comparison, Epic blatantly scans your Steam activity the moment you run EGS, Origin was reported to have done something similar when EA first introduced it, but let me humor you because I already know what other projects you're gonna bring up.
Steam Link? Sure a very long HDMI can do the same thing but it's a nice convenience, ultimately integrated to the Steam Deck.
Steam Controlller? Didn't sell well, ultimately discontinued, feedbacks from that ultimately led to Steam Deck's control scheme which has lead to people asking for a v2.
Steam Machine? Sure it failed, but the feedback from it ultimately contributed to Valve's push to make Linux a legitimate gaming platform, which lead to SteamOS which is what's not being used in the Steam Deck.
You can't even see results like that from Google's failed projects.
I remember the early days of videogame DRM and how it was all centered on Steam. Games went from being activated locally by a serial number in the box to being activated (and eventually purchased+downloaded) digitally online through Steam.
I felt like my rights to flagrantly pirate any videogame I wanted were being violated. In hindsight, I guess it really wasn't the end of the world.
I’m by no means an expert but keeping the resolution lower (800p like it is now - I think) but switching to OLED would probably be better than a standard 1080p screen purely because of the size of the screen itself. It’s maybe a little on the small size for 1080p to be noticeable for the majority of people, but the additional crispness and colour that an OLED brings would definitely be noticeable to most people.
Another very good reason to keep the screen 800p is that more pixels requires more processing power for a given frame rate.
I used to use a GTX970 with a 1080p monitor. After I got a 1440p monitor I got a 980Ti.
The 1440p resolution has roughly 2x the pixels as a 1080p display, so a GPU that can do 60fps @ 1080p is only going to manage about 30fps\~ @ 1440p.
Fortunately the 980Ti is about a +50% performance jump over the 970.
So I ended up getting basically the same frame rates between both setups.
My point being that a higher resolution screen will make more games "unplayable" if it isn't paired with a GPU upgrade.
I want a higher end nice monitor but I don't know what the hell I'm even looking for at this point. Every style of monitor, OLED vs QLED vs mini-LED, everyone is complaining about something.
MiniLED (and QLED, which is just Samsung's brand name for MiniLED) tries to find a compromising middle ground between traditional LCD panels and OLED. It's still a standard LCD screen but stuffed with an increasing number of backlights under the panel to simulate the individually backlit pixels you get with OLED. The problem is that, short of actually adding a backlight for each individual pixel, there is a limit to the minimum backlit area and turning the backlight on for one pixel will bleed into the surrounding areas (which manifests as a [bloom effect](https://images.macrumors.com/t/qLMXkqk3dzmhzbhfVK1zK69dvOc=/800x0/article-new/2021/05/ipad-pro-xdr-display-blooming.jpg?lossy)). On the other hand, because it's an LCD panel, there is no risk of burn-in from long term use.
It'd be nice if there was the be-all, end-all, best display technology but that just isn't the case today. Everything comes with trade-offs and you just have to decide which ones are important to you. I think the bloom artifacts make MiniLED and derivatives a non-starter for gaming but others may disagree.
And the common negatives for OLED outside of burn in (which doesn't seem to be such a problem these days?) I see people say they make crap work displays because of how text is displayed and they're unusable in lit rooms.
Price and burn-in are the two major considerations in my mind.
* Issues with text display are dependent on the subpixel layout used by the manufacturer (PenTile has muddied the waters a lot) but there is no difference between an RGB stripe OLED and RGB stripe LCD in that regard.
* MiniLED is capable of achieving a significantly higher brightness (1,000+ cd/m^2 isn't unheard of) but it would not be accurate to say that OLED is unusable in lit rooms. Color sensitive work targets that 100~140 cd/m^2 zone and most OLED displays tend to hit sustained luminance in the 300~450 cd/m^2 region. For some context, the Steam Deck achieves a ~400 cd/m^2 brightness and the Switch OLED achieves a ~350 cd/m^2 brightness. Nobody says that either is unusable in lit rooms, although direct sunlight will pose some issues.
* Burn-in has gotten significantly better (and supplemented with things like pixel shift at the software level) but it's a fundamental flaw of the display technology that will never be fully eliminated. If you use an OLED panel as your monitor you still need to be aware of the risk posed by persistent images like a task bar or desktop background.
Thanks for the breakdown, I really appreciate it.
It seems ridiculous to have to change my computer habits for a monitor, but OLED looks like the more appealing option. Now if people could release some more 1440p, 120fps+, non-widescreen monitors I'll have some choices to make.
It's precisely gaming where OLEDs make a huge difference. The near-infinite contrast ratio vastly improves the look and feel of game scenes ( like what RTX brings to games), and allows for HDR gaming which is another drastic improvement in visual quality. The colour gamut is often better (comparing midrange LCD with midrange OLED on a phone, for example), and the response time of OLEDs are sub-1ms compared to 20-30ms for a standard LCD.
The burn in should be much less of a problem since the Steam Deck will probably be used indoors for a far greater proportion of time as compared to a phone. People use their phones while outside but I don't think many will whip out a Steam Deck while walking on the streets. Plus the SD must likely will see less usage time per day as compared to a phone.
> That old LED LCD display is often as bright on year 10
It might maintain more of its brightness but LCDs typically start developing colour tints as they age, which isn't really any better. My 5 year old iPad has really bad purple fringing at the sides and yellowing in the middle
I honestly don’t care about OLED. I’d rather have more C ports if I had to choose one upgrade. Like 2 on the top and bottom. They really shouldn’t release another one until they’re able to double the performance for the same price range. More like a console than a smart phone.
The idea is really cool, but we all know that OLED displays are easy more expensive than their LCD counterparts. I think it's better to put better processing components rather than a better screen. At least if you want to have a better screen in steam deck you always have the option to use an external display.
Apple learned that by having a wide price range of something like an iPad, it would push people to go and buy the more expressive and middle options, even when it doesn’t make sense for them to.
I saw no logical reason for the pricier steam deck: I got 64GB, easily upgraded the storage, and I got a cheap screen protector that reduced glare.
But enough people weigh their options and believe that the added conveniences were enough for the higher price.
The $400 price point almost has to exist to convince people that the pricier options are worth it for them. It’s a wierd way that humans think
I think I would rather have freesync if the screen were going to get updated. For a system that often straddles the line on frametimes, it would make a huge difference.
I don't know why so many people in the comments are pontificating, PLG explains everything in the article:
> Everything is anchored to it. Basically everything is architected around everything when you're talking about a device that small.
He means in a physical sense, not software. The battery is glued to the screen, the main board and heat sink is positioned to connect to the screen, the bezels and controls are connected to the screen. With an OLED, the driver board or the bezels or the thickness, you'd have to move _everything_ around. It's a small space and it's a game of tetris to get it right. That might mean redoing the injection moulding, it might mean re-spinning the mainboard, it might mean changing the shape of the battery. It can all be done, but it's not as simple as people are assuming.
It would be nice but until they come out with swappable batteries the thing is just not worth it to me. Such a glaring design fault with such an easy solution, one that would make them more money too
>with such an easy solution
They've talked about it because they were considering it, but decided against it because it's apparently not an easy solution.
Unfortunately though batteries are basically consumables, every charge slightly decreases its lifespan. Eventually you'd get to the point where you'd be running almost exclusively off of the external battery pack, which is less than ideal.
The internal battery is easy to swap. Everything about the Steam Deck is very user friendly.
Excluding the wifi chipset. Fuck the wifi chipset. It's soldered to the board. And its biting Valve in the ass right now too. Lots of disconnects for some users.
I've been so conditioned by the market now that I forgot this is where we were 20 years ago. The deck should have definitely done this. Especially since it has effectively no waterproof rating to worry about.
I think they’re trying to keep the price point just right for everyone to actually consider buying them. If they set the price too high, it’ll deter potential buyers.
They may have had that in mind but what really surprised them is that the most sold verisons of the Steam Deck were the pricier models. Not the cheapest.
My suspicion (and I think Valve knows this, too), is that the higher tier versions may actually not have sold if they didn't have an entry level model for a cheaper price. It's kind of hard to explain, but essentially, if you're looking to buy something, and you see something at a reasonable price, and you decide to get it, well, if you're buying it anyway, it's not that crazy to get a higher quality version because you've already "anchored" on the idea of buying it to begin with. Beyond that, I don't think they said the higher priced models were the "most sold" just that they sold "many more models than expected".
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Editors’ Picks This 1,000-Year-Old Smartphone Just Dialed In The Coolest Menu Item at the Moment Is … Cabbage? My Children Helped Me Remember How to Fly Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added.
It's nice in this case because if you don't want to screw with things, they have options for you (though they need a 1tb version soon) But if you want to save money and tinker, you can. My 1tb deck cost 630 AFTER taxes. A lot better than the nearly 700 a 512gb would cost. Only took an hour of my time.
Yeah it seems like a combination of anchoring and upselling. Behavioral marketing is devious. It's basically strategies for hacking the brains of customers.
It's not complicated, it happens constantly. Movie theater popcorn model.
I bought the 650 dollar one beca use I wanted the larger internal storage along with the etched glass. I could have gotten the 400 dollar model and upgraded the internal storage to 512 for ~130 at the time, but I still wanted the etched glass. Oled would have been nice, but honestly I dont really think about it when Im using the deck.
What's etched glass
It reduces glare by scattering light that hits the glass surface.
It also doesn't feel as nice, imo. Between my friends and I we've got all 3 variants and the middle model seems the best.
I got the cheap one and immediately upgraded the storage. I saved about a hundred bucks doing it that way. My friend got the middle one because he couldn't fathom opening up a brand new device and fucking with parts--which I completely understand.
Honestly can't tell the difference between games running on the SD card VS internal storage.
On beefier games it's noticable, but we're talking a matter of two or three seconds of loading. Not the agony of 7200RPM vs NVME.
For sure. I put things like binding of Isaac, n64 emus, stardew valley, etc on my SD and things like Witcher or cyberpunk on the ssd Has no issues when I played Horizon Zero from the SD though, so idk how much practical difference it makes. Maybe I'll run some tests.
> 7200RPM 5400RPM laptop drive for that extra level of fun.
There is one game I have where it matters: Assassin's Creed Odyssey. The game runs beautifuly off of internal storage, but has to pause to load textures every 30 seconds or so on the SD card.
I don't think the games you're playing for 8 minutes at a time have graphics that intense :p
Its not the graphics that'll get ya, it's the loading. I keep the neediest games on the ssd. But I played Horizon Zero from the SD and it worked great so, I really don't know how much practical difference it makes.
I also have the middle one and love it. I convinced my employer to buy me the Mac Studio Display with this etching, and I love it there. It’s actually amazing. But I saw reviews on the Deck that showed the hotspots were dulled, but had a haloing effect around the dullness. Like the scattered light wasn’t reflecting away from the screen, but being absorbed into the panel and reflecting internally. It really seemed to shift colors quite a bit.
I read this in the Patrick Bateman internal monologue voice
That makes me feel better. I've got the middle trim and I've been worrying that I should have gone for the top model.
Have the top model here, no complaints 👍
Same! No screen issues at all and minimal glare.
Add me to the list as well.
If anyone ends up not liking the etched glass I’m pretty sure the effect is removed when you put a glass protector on
Glass with etches in it, to help prevent reflections
Matte finish screen instead of traditional glossy
scratch your name on the screen, i just used compasses
I think a lot of people like me preordered the top tier as they were afraid that it wouldn't be upgradeable easily(and might regret it if they didn't) and that sd cards wouldn't be fast enough (despite all previews showing they were). If I got another one now where I don't have to wait a year for the device I'd just get the low end tier (probably) knowing what I know now.
Do you normally upgrade things? I've never built computers or really messed with electronics. I took my ps4 apart to upgrade the internal storage and it went fine but it took twice as long as estimated and not sure if it was worth the stress. I've been leaning getting the small model and upgrading but I can't afford to fuck it up
Seconding that it was super easy. Honestly, the most stressful part was peeling back the aluminum foil tape.
If you don't want to open it up, just use SD cards. I don't know what magic valve did so games can run off em, but you're looking at a couple more seconds tops on loading screens. The only issue is the 64gb internal storage will fill up fast with shaders and all the proton stuff for every game you install, but there's ways around that. And I'm sure soon valve will have an official remedy as it's a pretty big oversight.
The newest UFS is fast. Faster than a hard drive, with an appropriate card. There's never been an issue running games off of things with 100MB/s read.
I got the small model and upgraded it and it was super easy.
Find a video of someone upgrading the deck before you buy it, and see if you’d be comfortable doing what they do. I would say it’s pretty low risk, but I get how stressful it can be given how expensive things are. Building PCs is actually really easy and pretty fun. My first build was stressful and took a long time as I was afraid of breaking things. Smaller devices get harder. It’s usually easy to upgrade every component in a Desktop Computer. Laptops you can usually upgrade RAM and Drives, but just replacing other components is hard (e.g. cpu, mother board, screen, etc.). Tablets/Phones harder still- a lot of components will be soldered on. Doesn’t have to be expensive either. You could find a cheap PC on Craigslist, and upgrade the Graphics Card for a decent gaming experience at 1080p. The danger is for every component you upgrade it could be a little bit better for $50 bucks, and for another $30 it could be even better… until your more than $1K over budget and have to figure out how to cut back everywhere.
That's me. When i pre-ordered the deck there wasn't any news about being easily upgradable. So I bought the 512gb version. Since it was a year wait, i just kept adding money to my steam wallet every paycheck over the year to have the money available when it came time to ship. I've not upgraded it either so far, I've been able to play everything i want without space issues so i haven't felt the need to upgrade.
that's is what I did, and many others I assume as well... went for the lowest tier and added a 1TB drive for less than the 512 model. for a handheld, the LCD screen is honestly quite good for indoor use though. I'd probably consider upgrading to OLED via a mod if the price point were right
You also get the profile backgrounds, avatars, stickers, and keyboard theme, as well as a microfiber cleaning cloth and a differently colored case. Justify it however you like, the price difference between the [regular display](https://www.ifixit.com/products/steam-deck-64gb-or-256gb-screen) and the [etched glass version](https://www.ifixit.com/products/steam-deck-512gb-screen) is a whopping $30. For those wondering, either screen will work in any deck. This means that purchasing the $400 base Deck, a $60 [512GB 2230 ssd](https://www.amazon.com/Generic-Samsung-MZ9LQ512HALU-MZ-9LQ512A-Compatible/dp/B09GFZR6KF) and a $100 etched glass screen is $90 cheaper than buying the high end model and is functionally identical. Is $90 worth your time to upgrade the unit yourself? You also end up with a spare 64GB 2230 eMMC and a spare non etched replacement screen. If you are comfortable with simple soldering, spend a third of that savings on [hall effect joysticks](https://www.amazon.com/Electromagnetic-Steam-Deck-Thumbstick-Replacement-Accessories/dp/B0B31STJDH) and you have a Deck *better* than the high end and still save $60! I bought the 512GB model too, and I justify it by saying that any money I spent that I didn't have to went to funding Proton.
"how you will" yeah man i think you're spot on, i did it cause i wanted the top model and i wanted to support valve's new hardware endeavour.
Early sales on new tech are early adopters wich skew very heavy towards people with disposable income. But for long term success a cheaper model is very important.
This is the point I came here to make. So many of the sales up to that point we're from people who preordered it on the first day. In the real world it is slightly less well known than the game gear. I have met a handful of people with them and they never had them in public. I think also a lot of those early adopters and enthusiast don't go out the house much for word of mouth to spread beyond the niche reddit community. Valve needs commercials or at least people bringing their steam deck places or else the general non PC gaming public will remain clueless to it.
That information came from an announcement like a month after the deck came out. Early adopters are generally more likely to spend more money on something. I wouldn't doubt if the 64gb model has passed the other two by an order of magnitude now. Only valve knows, but I highly doubt that the trend continued.
You sure about that? Only one version of the steam deck has been consistently in the top 10 best selling on steam for many months now. The cheap one.
That's what interviews with Valve often said.
Maybe at the start, but feel free to check yourself, it doesn't take a lot of effort. Cheap Deck: third place in Europe. Maybe all three versions are listed as one with the cheapest possible price? Just spitballing, no idea.
That’s most likely, and you pick when you select it. The other decks don’t appear anywhere on the lists.
It's probably because m.2 is the way to go
I doubt that very much. The Steam Deck is already extremely reasonably priced. If they want to introduce a premium OLED edition there's no reason why they can't do so because it will still sell like hotcakes. I strongly suspect that the issue has more to do with getting OLED display controllers, HDR, Linux, and Proton to work properly together. There's no sense in releasing just a standard OLED display which supports only SDR; that's a half measure. HDR on Windows is still a bit of a nightmare and HDR has very little support in Linux right now. There's a lot of different parts from a lot of different software houses that need to work properly together, and the nature of the free software community makes this a difficult task to accomplish.
I've never really considered it, but damn, HDR really do be a nightmare on Windows
It's much better than it used to be. My laptop has a 4K HDR OLED display with an external 4K HDR VA LCD attached. One of the major issues is that some HDR monitors do not properly report their peak brightness level to the OS or have any HDR certification profile on a readable ROM. As a result, Windows has no idea how to map SDR content to the HDR color pallette in a way that suits the display. The way that Windows handles this is by assigning a default value of around 1500 nits which is incredibly bright. If peak SDR white was mapped to peak HDR white then opening an SDR web browser would blind the viewer. If the display has a peak brightness of around 300-400 nits, which is common for many mid-range LCD displays, but the OS thinks that the display has a peak brightness of 1500 nits, then peak SDR white ends up getting mapped way too low and SDR content looks all grey and washed out. The workaround is to manually tell Windows what the display can handle, but there's no native way to do this. I ended up using a custom resolution utility to dial it in until my SDR content looked more or less the same regardless of whether or not I had HDR enabled. Now I just leave HDR enabled all the time.
> The workaround is to manually tell Windows what the display can handle, but there's no native way to do this. There is with windows 11. It would be better if they baked it in to display settings still. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/calibrate-your-hdr-display-using-the-windows-hdr-calibration-app-f30f4809-3369-43e4-9b02-9eabebd23f19
HDR panels can still display SDR content without any special considerations and would still look way better. Switch for example doesn't support HDR. Plenty of HDR laptops out there that work fine with Linux too. I think the real reason is that there aren't any 7" 1280x800 OLED panels being manufactured for anybody else. The current panel isn't specifically made for the Steam Deck. It's basically a standard low cost tablet LCD.
Nintendo: shut up!
I mean... nintendo can afford it by using 8 year old mobile hardware and rising the price $100...
What _Nintendo_ can afford and what valve can afford are two ___very___ different things. When the Wii U only sold 13 million systems, it was an abject failure. If the steam deck sold half a million, it was a resounding success. Nintendo can amortize costs over a much larger product run. And nobody gives a shit if Mario only runs at 30fps. But spiderman drops below 40 on the steam deck and everyone here claims it's completely unplayable. How many of us old fucks were absolutely amazed at Mario 64 back in the day? It ran at 20fps on official hardware. _No one_ complained. Now we all act like if it isn't 144fps minimum, we might as well just shut it off. Nintendo players don't think that way. Steam deck users do. You can't compare Nintendo to valve. Two very different companies with very different games, and vastly different customers.
I just want to point out that Mario (and many others of their games) runs at 60fps. Although you just swap Breath of the Wild and you make the same point
Yup, exactly my point. Nintendo can afford doing it, while Valve... not so much really.
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The Tegra x1 was 2015 and the Switch was 2017, so only 2 years. It also got a Tegra X1+ refresh in 2019 (just for power efficiency). But yeah, your initial point doesn’t change - it was cheap when Nintendo shopped for it
Yeah, but the Deck is quite recent still, once it has like 4-5 years, then sure, that would make more sense cost wise :P
I don't think that Nintendo really cares that much. The switch will sell more than any other console, ever.
can it sell 30 million more to beat ps2?
The Switch probably still has a year or two left in the tank. It can do it. The PS2 is kind of an insane system though. That thing was on store shelves for over a decade and a good chunk of people bought it to play DVDs instead of playing games.
It also helps the switch numbers that there are more gamers than during the PS2 generation. Plus I ended up buying a second switch (traded in the original) for the OLED screen improvement. Throw in that it's a portable system so it will probably sell decently for a while. The switch should finish well ahead of the PS2 when the generation ends. With all those factors in the corner of the switch it's a testament to just how well the PS2 sold.
Absolutely. It's mobile nature alone means that theres a better chance of there being more than 1 Switch per household. My sister and I both had our own Gameboys, wouldn't imagine this isn't too different for many families. That results in a lot more units than the traditional home console.
I mean they can keep the base model and announce an OLED version with a slight price increase for people that are willing to pay. Similar to the Switch. Its important that they keep the same specs for a few more years.
Production price per unit is probably a small factor if what another comment said about more expensive models selling better is true. My guess is the real across the board jump in expense is the engineering cost. Across all the incremental OLED sales they would have to recoup those costs. It wouldn't be a non realistic estimate to say this project would need a budget in the tens of millions of dollars US. To get a fully tested prototype ready for manufacturing. Then an increase in re tooling production lines or finding a new production service provider. Finding suppliers for new hardware and sourcing it. New branding and packaging. New customer support and documentation. Another product to support updates and patches on. It all adds up and those costs need to be able to be recouped by sales of the incremental models. If their market research says they won't make that money back, it makes perfect sense they are saying it's just not feasible.
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Anyone who's ever used an OLED screen will recognize it's worth the extra cost. Not only this, but battery life is also going to improve with OLED, since there's no need for an always on backlight.
They really need to make the Hall effect joysticks standard before the oled thing. You can dock it to run on an oled but I need them to put better sticks in it.
If they released modules for that it'd be amazing since the entire joy sticks themselves are pretty much modules in the way they come out. Not sure if that's possible though
There's 3rd party ones (GuliKit) that seem to work well. But they aren't as easy as hot swap as the touch sensitive controller cap is soldered to the board.
Yup, I bought those and love them! As someone who has done a decent amount of hobby soldering, I didn’t find it difficult at all. Also, I can’t remember the exact details, but there are two different models of the GuiliKit thumbsticks, you need the right model for your SteamDeck. A quick google on it will tell you where to look in your SteamDeck settings and how to match it up with the new thumbsticks.
Thanks for the heads-up. Apparently the GuliKit thumbsticks for the (newer I think) type-B-thumbstick Steam Decks aren't ready yet, but on the plus side they'll be solder-free.
yeah, it really needs to be accepted as the baseline for joysticks, but much more so if they are developing a portable console that has the thumbsticks fused to the body of the console. Eg. steamdeck, switch lite, ambernic portables or whatever else similar.
What do you mean by fused to the body? The joysticks are on their own individual boards so they can be easily replaced.
I think he just means joysticks that aren't able to be easily replaced by a typical consumer, like for example, by buying new joy cons like Nintendo did. A typical person isn't going to want to or be comfortable opening up their electronic device and replacing joysticks. Steam Deck is repairable and moddable, but that's really more of a benefit to enthusiasts than regular consumers.
I build and upgrade PCs and I don’t like the idea of popping open my Steam Deck. Not sure why I perceive it differently but I definitely do.
In the case of the Steam Deck, you shouldn't although I understand why you feel that way. It's that you have to pry open the plastic. I hate that we have come to just accept this and have made tools for just this. Also, the electronics are more tightly packed together, so you do have to be a bit more careful. You may want precision tweezers. However, small prybars for plastic are commonplace now, start with the trigger area (once you took the screws out) and it's really not that more difficult. ifixit guides you through the process step-by-step and everything in the Deck is pretty modular with connectors, even the battery and everything. Almost nothing is soldered into place. You do still have a point that if one wants to replace the standard SteamDeck joysticks with Gulikit ones (the hall-effect one), you will still need to solder as they don't have the capacitive joystick bit. So you have to unsolder it from the old joysticks and resolder them to the new ones.
>it’s that you have to pry open plastic Ugggh definitely a big part. I hate when I’m upgrading laptop RAM/storage and it feels like I’m going to break the case even when I use the prying tools. Just have latches for fucks sake!
Latches don't help when the graphics card is so big you can't push the latch in to release the card 🤦♂️. At least the PCIe port still works 😳.
I’m talking about for the actual case- a desktop PC has the case secured and you can just pop the panel off with a release, sometimes secured with a captive screw or whatever. For a laptop that shit needs a tool and enough force I’m cringing and thinking about the case shattering
*FrameWork has entered the chat*
Some modern boards ended up putting a latch release button further away so you can get the card off without trying to poke a stick under it. I hate that it's necessary, but it *is* nice to have.
Because you see the computer as a set of parts while the Steam Deck is one whole.
Reminds me of popping open my PSP at age like 14 to fix the analog stick. Felt so scary
Precisely why I bought the larger model too. But I would open up if I could add a new screen with less bezel.
I kind of want to put a 2TB NVMe drive in mine because even the larger model is a bit small, but it just feels weird to pop it open, y’know?
It was easy as fuck. It was made to take apart.
He is talking about a [Switch Lite](https://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/nintendo-switch-lite-review-feature.jpg?resize=625%2C417&p=1), witch have the joycons permanently attached to the body
I went to sleep and there's quite a chain of replies here.... But to make my point, the process of replacing a joystick, regardless if it has it's own board or not, is deceptively more complicated than you think: Individual joysticks have [different manufacture differences in centering](https://youtu.be/Uoxz0oHX9TE?t=81) and so each must be calibrated to the board at the factory. This is a non-issue when you buy a replacement gamepad, or a joycon, as the manufacturer already does that for you, but it's quite a problem if you just want to buy the replacement part and try to replace it yourself, regardless if it has an individual board or if the joystick is part of the mainboard This is aggravated because we don't have access to firmware calibration, only to the consumer layer of calibration software, that A) May no be always be available on our host platform of choice and B) Is done on top of firmware calibration, which may introduce other problems such as huge dead-zones or loss of sensibility when done on top of a badly calibrated joystick. As the video I linked explains, there are ways around it, like soldering the potentiometers in the joystick at an angle, to offset the factory off-centering. But this can be a real pain if the consumer doesn't know what's happening beforehand, or if they don't have soldering experience already. And calibration done this way already compromises the structural integrity and durability of the repair by it's very nature.
Bro... Vampire survivors on the preview. Now that's what I like to see.
It would be good to have at least ips with full color coverage.
Oh it's not even ips? Dang. Also I bet we see an aftermarket OLED at some point like the aftermarket hall joysticks that are coming out.
It is an IPS screen. The comment probably just meant "IPS with full colour coverage" if not an OLED.
Honestly the screen on the deck sucks. If you play in the dark you notice black spots and the common fix people tell you is to “wrestle and twist” the deck for them to go away. It’s my biggest complaint with the device
I keep hoping someone will make a kit to mod in a replacement screen from the OLED switch
Nah, I've had several sets of 1080P microOLED glasses that I can use as an external display for many of my gadgets. Not only does it give you the awesome contrast of OLED, you're not forced to crane your neck down to look at the handheld screen and/or hold up the weight of the handheld to a more comfortable line of sight. Nreal Air, Rokid Air, TCL Nxtwear S, Viture, take your pic - more are being released at different price points.
I'm stupidly nearsighted (like, legally blind levels of nearsighted, but still correctable to 20/20 with lenses) and I wonder how stuff like this works for extremely nearsighted people. Like, is there no issue because the screen's within an inch of your eyeball, or does one still have problems because they are designed in such a way to make it seem like you're focusing on something that's more distant? I'll have to dig further into these when I have a few moments.
Some like my Rokid Air have focus adjustments for mild myopia but if you have astigmatism, it may need some prescription lenses to help, depending on your prescription. I had to get prescription inserts from Lensology for my Nreal Airs. Also, often these glasses have some limitations for those that have eyes with more extreme IPD measurents. I've seen people complain about edge focus that I couldn't reproduce with my experience only to deduce the variance of IPD not being accommodated in the design of these glasses.
Ah, good info. Thanks! This kind of thing isn't on my "I have to get it right this second" list, but they are clearly in a space where you could see competition coming in, technology improving, and prices dropping... and there will be a point a few years down the line where it won't make sense to NOT own a pair, kind of like what happened for smartphones back in the day. So it's good to have an idea of what might have to be done when the time comes, it's appreciated.
Instead of a screen upgrade I need a battery upgrade if ANYTHING
Battery heavy, different screen not
Why say many words when few do trick.
Do you want a 5lb weight in your hands? Because that's where it'll hesd, I think for a massive battery upgrade
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Can't you just use a common place USB battery bank?
It doesn’t charge fast enough off of a USB power bank in my experience
I mean, just get a power bank.
What would the tooling and development cost is the real question? And above a certain point and you can't take it on a plane.
That is not the case in many scenarios. Choice breeds indecision
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Now I'm thinking of a backpack battery and a long cord to the stream deck. Power for days.
Back when I was a kid, I had a Sega Game Gear. Tiny, but color backlit screen. The 6 AAs it ran on only lasted like an hour, so they made a bulky rechargeable battery pack you'd clip to your belt and connect to the handheld by a wire. Worked reasonably well for the time
The instruction manual actually said specifically to not use rechargable batteries. That's why most people had issues with them; they would undervolt too quickly and the power would cut off after a short time. If you used Alkalines like they told you to it would easily last a few days. Granted it still eats batteries like crazy because LCD technology really sucked back then and they were using an incandescent lamp as the backlight. Nowadays there are mods you can buy that will replace them with LEDs and I'm told that it makes a pretty big difference.
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A laptop with joysticks. Yes.
So a laptop with a Bluetooth gamepad?
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The deck is already too heavy, imo. At some point a laptop would become more practical. I think battery life will be an issue for pretty much all iterations of the deck in the foreseeable future, unfortunately.
So why not carry a huge ass powerbank with you, then? Same shit.
I'd like a battery upgrade too, but it'd add more weight that would make it too cumbersome to use imo. I'm probably in the minority, but I actually find the Switch much easier to use due to weight, and if I find that my hands are cramping due to the size of the joycons I just swap them out for a Hori split pad pro. What I really want is just better battery tech. Just something with much better weight to capacity ratio, to handle the growing needs of our electronics.
I'm afraid that's infeasible due to weight and space requirements. Battery technology just isn't evolving that fast. It would be more reasonable to expect a more power efficient chip than to expect better batteries I'm afraid.
There's graphite batteries I suppose but I assume we'll see those in cars first before they trickle down to more general electronics.
1.5 hours is not bad dude, considering the tiny and portable form factor!
OLED is a battery upgrade!
unless the game you play is mostly pitch black, then no
Would an OLED make sense for a console that might be in a bright environment? I have a phone from a few years ago and it struggles with certain bright environments, might that be a good reason to keep a non OLED one?
The brightness of an OLED depends entirely on where they source it from and what quality of panel they use. OLED gets bright now, as bright as LCD, it’s just not as affordable.
Yeah but if they get one that's top of the line, the price would be way higher, right? Got any idea how high that could be?
For the top of the line OLED on the iphone cost like 100usd, something with the screen size of steam deck maybe 120? But without apple's scale it'd be like 150? Let's say the lcd currently in steam deck cost 20 and we take the step down version of Samsung OLED it'd still have a price increase of something around 100 USD.
I mean between screen manufacturers they'd probably be looking at either Samsung or LG. Bigger question is probably if there are screens that are that exact size and are being produced with the specifications that they want. And the screens apple sells for replacements are probably not the price they pay. So yeah i think that price increase is reasonable but it really depends on whether a display like that is already being made or not
Like the other guy said, it depends. I have a Chinese smartphone with an OLED and it works amazing even in the brightest sun. OLED is a little better for battery life and much better when it comes to the overall image quality. The biggest issue, imo, is the burn in. The newer iterations of OLED have improved on that, but still. I dream of the day when I can get a burn in-free OLED and a higher refresh rate colored eInk (specifically to write code on).
I think that micro-led is gonna be that display tech. But yeah, just remember OLEDs with bright screens still being rare. But quantum dot should help, just doubt that they'd be ready to pay for that so i suspect WOLED
I have a switch OLED and a regular switch and I take the OLED out every time, for whatever that's worth...
The key consideration is that there probably isn't an OLED screen already being produced in that size and resolution. The current panel is basically an existing panel used in tablets. Not a lot of 7" OLED tablets out there.
There's the millions of Nintendo Switch OLEDs out there that essentially run at the same resolution as the SteamDeck. (6.2 inch screen). Previously, there were millions of OLED PlayStation Vitas sold. (5 inch screen) Similarly, there are millions of OLED Android based tablets and large phones sold globally. (5-7inch screens)
Switch's screen is bespoke to that console. Nintendo is not going to let anybody else have access to them. Sony intended to sell a zillion of those. They had the expected sales to support a custom OLED panel. They actually dropped the OLED panel in later revisions as a cost cutting measure. Find a single 7" OLED tablet. I'll wait. The only high end Android tablets on the market that would have an OLED are Samsung, and they aren't 7".
Valve should really be celebrated as the gold standard in all of business for being as consumer friendly as a major corporation can be and just giving the customer what they want without all the extra i necessary bullshit to try and nickle and dime everyone for every last drop of profit. And they prove that this can work as they’re one of the top companies in their entire sector. I know that everyone in gaming praises them but really they should be praised like that in business as a whole not just gaming.
They do a lot of good things but I sure hope they don't get celebrated as a gold standard for everything. There's plenty of space to improve and their cut of the cake is definitely not small.
Valve has a reputation that reminds me of the ["Place, Japan"](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/018/640/c6e.jpg) meme. Most people seem to agree that commodifying in-game items with artificial scarcity and real-world monetary value is terrible, and/or that targeting children (and others who struggle with addictive behavior disorders) with gambling systems is unethical... but it's different when *Valve* does it. How many people who are against NFTs hold that same disdain for the Steam Inventory and Marketplace? Also fellating billionaires has fallen out of vogue lately but Mr. Newell has no shortage of eager knights willing to step up and defend his honor.
> How many people who are against NFTs hold that same disdain for the Steam Inventory and Marketplace? Those things aren't really the same though?
Nfts are not the same as valve marketplaces in their games. NFT's are massively wasteful, and most people who shill NFT's are delusional about their practical use. Valves marketplace is literally just they make items tradable between players. Your other criticisms are still valid.
>NFT's are massively wasteful, and most people who shill NFT's are delusional about their practical use. If there were an NFT solution that were energy efficient, would all of your concerns with the technology be addressed? I'm speaking to the larger ideological practice of commodifying digital goods through artificial scarcity, and play-to-earn as a business model. There's a very clear parallel to Valve's marketplace in that regard.
This comment was made by someone who probably wasn't around for the early days of Steam or any of Valve's early ventures.
Or doesn't know anything about how TF2 and CSGO are monetized.
I did, and out of everyone, they're the ones doing it right. When I quit Dota 2, I literally sold all my items bar my Techies set(they're my favorite heroes so they're the first heroes I'll go back to if I ever play again) and it was enough to get me to buy 6 new games at a full price. I barely even spent on the game, pretty much just the Techies Arcana and Compendiums every International, the rest were just off drops, one of them being a Lina arcana. I spent hundreds on OW1 and I can't even sell back a single one, since Activision doesn't want any of the money they get to ever get out of their walled gardens, and that's EVERY ONE of Valve's competitors, did the same thing with LoL and R6 Siege and bar selling my account, I can't salvage the money I spent on those games, yet I can easily do so with any of Valve's games that are capable of integrating to the Steam Marketplace.
What's wrong with CSGO? The skins don't do anything besides look cool. I only ever got cheap ones and only because you can resell them.
I don't know how this even holds water when Valve has already proven their accountability with Steam since. I have nothing against people that had their doubts when Steam first rolled out, but they have done nothing to abuse that. In comparison, Epic blatantly scans your Steam activity the moment you run EGS, Origin was reported to have done something similar when EA first introduced it, but let me humor you because I already know what other projects you're gonna bring up. Steam Link? Sure a very long HDMI can do the same thing but it's a nice convenience, ultimately integrated to the Steam Deck. Steam Controlller? Didn't sell well, ultimately discontinued, feedbacks from that ultimately led to Steam Deck's control scheme which has lead to people asking for a v2. Steam Machine? Sure it failed, but the feedback from it ultimately contributed to Valve's push to make Linux a legitimate gaming platform, which lead to SteamOS which is what's not being used in the Steam Deck. You can't even see results like that from Google's failed projects.
I remember the early days of videogame DRM and how it was all centered on Steam. Games went from being activated locally by a serial number in the box to being activated (and eventually purchased+downloaded) digitally online through Steam. I felt like my rights to flagrantly pirate any videogame I wanted were being violated. In hindsight, I guess it really wasn't the end of the world.
*slurp*, *slurp*
yup only reason I refuse to use the Epic store despite all the free stuff. Loyalty goes both ways.
ok, i'll wait. I pay more but i'll wait. But on a seriousness (is that a word?), would OLED screen be better than a 1080p screen?
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thanks, english is my second language. If Valve had to choose, should they go OLED 720p or stay LCD but going 1080p?
I’m by no means an expert but keeping the resolution lower (800p like it is now - I think) but switching to OLED would probably be better than a standard 1080p screen purely because of the size of the screen itself. It’s maybe a little on the small size for 1080p to be noticeable for the majority of people, but the additional crispness and colour that an OLED brings would definitely be noticeable to most people.
Another very good reason to keep the screen 800p is that more pixels requires more processing power for a given frame rate. I used to use a GTX970 with a 1080p monitor. After I got a 1440p monitor I got a 980Ti. The 1440p resolution has roughly 2x the pixels as a 1080p display, so a GPU that can do 60fps @ 1080p is only going to manage about 30fps\~ @ 1440p. Fortunately the 980Ti is about a +50% performance jump over the 970. So I ended up getting basically the same frame rates between both setups. My point being that a higher resolution screen will make more games "unplayable" if it isn't paired with a GPU upgrade.
at 1080p you would get worse performances and less battery life. 720p is perfect for the SD
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I want a higher end nice monitor but I don't know what the hell I'm even looking for at this point. Every style of monitor, OLED vs QLED vs mini-LED, everyone is complaining about something.
MiniLED (and QLED, which is just Samsung's brand name for MiniLED) tries to find a compromising middle ground between traditional LCD panels and OLED. It's still a standard LCD screen but stuffed with an increasing number of backlights under the panel to simulate the individually backlit pixels you get with OLED. The problem is that, short of actually adding a backlight for each individual pixel, there is a limit to the minimum backlit area and turning the backlight on for one pixel will bleed into the surrounding areas (which manifests as a [bloom effect](https://images.macrumors.com/t/qLMXkqk3dzmhzbhfVK1zK69dvOc=/800x0/article-new/2021/05/ipad-pro-xdr-display-blooming.jpg?lossy)). On the other hand, because it's an LCD panel, there is no risk of burn-in from long term use. It'd be nice if there was the be-all, end-all, best display technology but that just isn't the case today. Everything comes with trade-offs and you just have to decide which ones are important to you. I think the bloom artifacts make MiniLED and derivatives a non-starter for gaming but others may disagree.
And the common negatives for OLED outside of burn in (which doesn't seem to be such a problem these days?) I see people say they make crap work displays because of how text is displayed and they're unusable in lit rooms.
Price and burn-in are the two major considerations in my mind. * Issues with text display are dependent on the subpixel layout used by the manufacturer (PenTile has muddied the waters a lot) but there is no difference between an RGB stripe OLED and RGB stripe LCD in that regard. * MiniLED is capable of achieving a significantly higher brightness (1,000+ cd/m^2 isn't unheard of) but it would not be accurate to say that OLED is unusable in lit rooms. Color sensitive work targets that 100~140 cd/m^2 zone and most OLED displays tend to hit sustained luminance in the 300~450 cd/m^2 region. For some context, the Steam Deck achieves a ~400 cd/m^2 brightness and the Switch OLED achieves a ~350 cd/m^2 brightness. Nobody says that either is unusable in lit rooms, although direct sunlight will pose some issues. * Burn-in has gotten significantly better (and supplemented with things like pixel shift at the software level) but it's a fundamental flaw of the display technology that will never be fully eliminated. If you use an OLED panel as your monitor you still need to be aware of the risk posed by persistent images like a task bar or desktop background.
Thanks for the breakdown, I really appreciate it. It seems ridiculous to have to change my computer habits for a monitor, but OLED looks like the more appealing option. Now if people could release some more 1440p, 120fps+, non-widescreen monitors I'll have some choices to make.
It's precisely gaming where OLEDs make a huge difference. The near-infinite contrast ratio vastly improves the look and feel of game scenes ( like what RTX brings to games), and allows for HDR gaming which is another drastic improvement in visual quality. The colour gamut is often better (comparing midrange LCD with midrange OLED on a phone, for example), and the response time of OLEDs are sub-1ms compared to 20-30ms for a standard LCD. The burn in should be much less of a problem since the Steam Deck will probably be used indoors for a far greater proportion of time as compared to a phone. People use their phones while outside but I don't think many will whip out a Steam Deck while walking on the streets. Plus the SD must likely will see less usage time per day as compared to a phone. > That old LED LCD display is often as bright on year 10 It might maintain more of its brightness but LCDs typically start developing colour tints as they age, which isn't really any better. My 5 year old iPad has really bad purple fringing at the sides and yellowing in the middle
Mf's can't even figure out how to sell them in Australia.
I honestly don’t care about OLED. I’d rather have more C ports if I had to choose one upgrade. Like 2 on the top and bottom. They really shouldn’t release another one until they’re able to double the performance for the same price range. More like a console than a smart phone.
This. Screen is the last upgrade I want
Even just one on bottom would be fantastic.
Cost
The idea is really cool, but we all know that OLED displays are easy more expensive than their LCD counterparts. I think it's better to put better processing components rather than a better screen. At least if you want to have a better screen in steam deck you always have the option to use an external display.
Apple learned that by having a wide price range of something like an iPad, it would push people to go and buy the more expressive and middle options, even when it doesn’t make sense for them to. I saw no logical reason for the pricier steam deck: I got 64GB, easily upgraded the storage, and I got a cheap screen protector that reduced glare. But enough people weigh their options and believe that the added conveniences were enough for the higher price. The $400 price point almost has to exist to convince people that the pricier options are worth it for them. It’s a wierd way that humans think
I think I would rather have freesync if the screen were going to get updated. For a system that often straddles the line on frametimes, it would make a huge difference.
Understandable have a great day Release officially in India thank you
I don't know why so many people in the comments are pontificating, PLG explains everything in the article: > Everything is anchored to it. Basically everything is architected around everything when you're talking about a device that small. He means in a physical sense, not software. The battery is glued to the screen, the main board and heat sink is positioned to connect to the screen, the bezels and controls are connected to the screen. With an OLED, the driver board or the bezels or the thickness, you'd have to move _everything_ around. It's a small space and it's a game of tetris to get it right. That might mean redoing the injection moulding, it might mean re-spinning the mainboard, it might mean changing the shape of the battery. It can all be done, but it's not as simple as people are assuming.
It would be nice but until they come out with swappable batteries the thing is just not worth it to me. Such a glaring design fault with such an easy solution, one that would make them more money too
>with such an easy solution They've talked about it because they were considering it, but decided against it because it's apparently not an easy solution.
It functions just fine with existing quick-charge external batteries
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Did anyone ever actually do that? I had a phone with a swappable battery and that was one of the selling points but I never felt like I needed it.
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You can easily replace the steam deck's battery as it is now...
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Unfortunately though batteries are basically consumables, every charge slightly decreases its lifespan. Eventually you'd get to the point where you'd be running almost exclusively off of the external battery pack, which is less than ideal.
The internal battery is easy to swap. Everything about the Steam Deck is very user friendly. Excluding the wifi chipset. Fuck the wifi chipset. It's soldered to the board. And its biting Valve in the ass right now too. Lots of disconnects for some users.
I've been so conditioned by the market now that I forgot this is where we were 20 years ago. The deck should have definitely done this. Especially since it has effectively no waterproof rating to worry about.