For fear of being told I’m old, I agree with that. Most all the previous decades has fairly obvious delimiters give or take a couple years. Once the internet and slab phones became ubiquitous it feels like things have melded and stopped changing as rapidly. With fashion we’ve gone cyclical with previous decades coming back in style too.
I have neither and still find the Steam Deck more appealing for me.
Whiiiich, lends me to the next question, is the Steam Deck an inferior product compared to all the other existing PC handhelds? I mean we all know we have seen the Steam Deck basically created this new sector (inspired by the Switch), but I have seen lots of hate, or lots of praise towards it, by different users and I can’t exactly pinpoint which is the truth (it seems like the console wars of nowadays lol), at the point that all the praise the Steam Deck gets is a meme (I see this behavior on YT especially where this handhelds really show).
I still think the Steam Deck has the best price, but at the time I have enough income for getting one (and putting aside they don’t ship to Mexico) I think the market will have newer alternatives lol.
It’s very similar to the raspberry pi in that other products have better on paper specs but the deck is the cultural hub and will have the longest support.
I thought Valve wasn’t known for a long support for handheld, at least that is one comment a friend of mine said (that the Deck would be forgotten as the Steam controller).
If it’s official or not, the deck has tons of third party support through companies like Jsaux and their colab with iFixit. On the software side you have Camera, Bazzite and a wealth of options should steam OS disappear. I don’t think Valve will drop the deck tbh and them not being known for long support of the handheld this is their first one, your friend might be talking about the steam controller but even that is still supported just not for sale and was very much a cult product rather than a successful one.
I think steam deck is a pretty good choice from that perspective.
There is little vendor lock in, you could upgrade from a deck to a competitor and so long as it uses steam you won’t really be missing out on anything
Valve has gone in pretty hard on repairability. so while it may become obsolete (and I don’t think it will for a while, Moores law isn’t what it used to be) it should still be able to run very far down the line.
The steam controller and ecosystem planned around it was a financial failure. While there were a hunch of enthusiasts into the steam controller (myself included) it never gained mainstream appeal. The steam machine that it was meant to synergize with did even worse. Otoh the valve index did pretty well and still is quite a popular pick if you wanna get into vr today despite being 5 yrs old, while vr wasnt as successful as i think some wanted (I blame meta for that!) It did carve out a niche for valve that helos there long term plans. The steam deck has been a run away success and also brings a big boost to a lot of valves long term strategies (decoupling from windows, competing with consoles, giving people a reason to stay on steam), and its already seen a refresh. I would be very surprised to not see a steamdeck 2, although it may be a while (valve has stated as much, because they want to make it easy for devs to target steam deck for recommended specs)
often have worse frame pacing and battery life especially compared to the OLED model.
Yeah, honestly the fact that the Deck with less raw power leaves similar results is a huge positive point I guess, I honestly haven’t seen anyone complaining that much because of the performance issues.
And yeah, better battery life is always good in my book, I think other handhelds have a joke of battery life.
the steam deck is less powerful than other handhelds, but is currently the best user experience and battery life on the handheld pc market. Even so the performance is often a non-issue, it can even play cyberpunk at a decent framerate.
but Windows is so astonishingly terrible on handhelds
The way you are telling me this reminds me of the old HP windows laptops I used to use that their battery life did not even last 2 hours lol (I eventually got a MacBook Pro and that was a massive upgrade).
I still don’t picture windows doing that great with laptops (as in optimization), but I don’t know, I have seen very good laptops with good specs very recently that it could maybe make up for Windows being not optimized for anything.
It’s a little like comparing a top of the line gaming laptop to a middle of the road efficient laptop. Sure the games will run a bit better on the powerful laptop, but you’re trading that for battery life. The Steam Deck is insanely efficient, and they made a few hard tradeoffs like the 1280x800 display resolution (which is great for battery, and honestly plenty sharp for the screen size).
I’m still a little blown away it runs Balder’s Gate 3 and Cyberlunk 2077 at all.
I’m kinda excited about that new activitypub Vine alternative. I want to see what video posts can be when they’re not inherently driven by anticonsumer modes of thinking.
I firmly believe that rather than superpositional, these are 11 dimensional. It doesn’t matter which direction you rotate it, it will still take you on average five or six 180° rotations until it fits into the damned slot.
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