Valve gave us the strongest wording yet that a Steam Deck 2 is actually real, although it's still clearly going to be some time away before there's enough of an upgrade.

The exact quote:

It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence. We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.

  • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzOPMEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Currently, swapping the battery is one of the most complex repairs on the Deck,

    Is it really? I know there’s some glue holding the battery itself, but otherwise my understanding is that the battery is really easy to access.

    • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 months ago

      iFixit rates it “Difficult” for the Steam Deck OLED and says the time required is 2-3 hours:

      https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+OLED+Battery+Replacement/168676

      This is a slight improvement from the original Deck’s estimated 2-4 hours:

      https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+Battery+Replacement/149070

      It requires removing quite a few parts but the most annoying part is getting rid of the adhesive. It doesn’t have easy-to-access pull tabs or whatever.

      They can certainly improve this. Either add pull tabs to the adhesive strips, or better yet use the mechanism from the iPhone 16 where you apply voltage to the adhesive to make dissolve/no longer stick. Or even better make it a screw-in battery without any glue whatsoever. Then update the routing of several cables so they aren’t in the way of removing the battery.