Everything Should Be As Easy to Upgrade As the Steam Deck
www.wired.com
The DIY days of making gadgets better and longer-lasting are long past—and possibly, hopefully, in the future.

I doubt this is news to anyone here, but always good to see positive coverage of the Deck

  • FubarberryOPMEnglish
    64•9 months ago

    Valve employees have said in interviews that they didn’t want the battery glued down, but that with the battery expanding and shrinking during use they couldn’t keep it from rattling around unless they glued it down. Other companies have managed this, so it’s not an impossible issue. However it wasn’t something valve was able to easily solve.

    As far as hall effect joysticks go, I’m not going to complain when none of the modern first party console controllers come with hall-effect. Microsoft and Sony have pro controllers for $150-200 that don’t come with hall effect sensors. Valve making the thumbsticks easily replaceable is enough imo. Things could be much worse, the Asus Ally uses the same type of thumbsticks as Nintendo Joycons for example.

    • kadu
      37•9 months ago

      I’m not going to complain when none of the modern first party console controllers come with hall-effect

      I will, when there are cheap third party controllers that have hall effect, and some random company managed to make them for the Steam Deck itself.

      • conciselyverbose
        12•9 months ago

        There’s a massive difference between being able to get the quantity to serve the small number of people willing to tinker and buy niche controllers and being able to get the quantity to serve a mass market.

          • conciselyverbose
            24•9 months ago

            It’s not cheaper if the manufacturing capacity literally doesn’t exist. You can’t just wave a magic wand and have a company be capable of making millions of units.

            Edit: It took several months after launch to clear the backlog and allow people to just order a Steam Deck, and it got occasionally backordered for several more months in some markets after that. Adding the constraint of being supply limited on joysticks would have almost definitely made that worse.

          • @klay@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1•9 months ago

            Dude, no need to be a dick about it. You made your point, the dunk undermines it.

    • @995a3c3c3c3c2424@feddit.nlEnglish
      20•9 months ago

      with the battery expanding and shrinking during use they couldn’t keep it from rattling around unless they glued it down.

      I’ve never designed mobile hardware, but it seems like the easy fix for that would be to glue the battery to a thin backplane and then screw the backplane down; then people could just replace the battery+backplane as a single unit…

      (ETA: but I’ll take a Steam Deck with a non-replaceable battery over any of the existing competition any day.)

      • @M500@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2•9 months ago

        What is the battery glues to? Can’t that entire piece just be replaced?

    • @Astroturfed@lemmy.world
      6•9 months ago

      You know what can handle expanding and shrinking and hold things in place? Foam, or I’m sure a dozen other solutions engineers have come up with for this problem over the last 50+ years.

    • @lobut@lemmy.ca
      3•9 months ago

      I really wish they were able to solve the battery issue. I bought my Deck like a week ago and battery is something that usually goes with time.

      I’m glad to hear an explanation as to why the battery is as glued as aggressively.