Valve won't be releasing a Steam Deck with more performance until at least 2025. Given the smartphone market's reputation for disappointing incremental updates, this is the right choice. Valve should, however, throw gamers a bone with a Steam Deck 1.5.
Annual phone refreshes make perfect sense.
You don’t have to buy a new one every year. But a stable production cycle is very useful at the volume Apple moves. Spikes and troughs for a multiple year cycle would be much more difficult to manage, and if you do actually need a phone at the end of a 3 or 5 year production cycle, you end up with a product 2 or 4 years of development behind what you could have, without even getting the benefit of being able to get it at the price of a phone a couple cycles behind.
The steam deck is functionally a console. It doesn’t have the volume to manage the same frequency of new devices.
Agreed and consoles have been shown to benefit from a longer cycle. Let devs get accustomed with the device and find ways to optimize games and engines for the specific configuration. I could see a mid cycle refresh with a lite version or an OLED/AMOLED screen (like the switch had) while keeping the same architecture.
I was going to make that point, but I don’t think the steam deck gets quite the same benefit on optimization. It could, but it needs a lot more volume before devs seriously target it.
More because they can just sell it on PC and a lot of us will tolerate it pushing the hardware past its limit anyways. A PS5 version has an explicit level of responsibility that the Steam Deck doesn’t, unless they’re actively advertising it. (That’s not deck verified, because developers don’t decide that.)
Yeah, with steam deck it just gets improved by improvements in proton, not a lot of deck specific things are done. I’m noticing games are running smoother on my Linux desktop because of this work.
Honestly, they don’t though.
Yes, they absolutely do. It would completely murder the supply chains to have such massive droughts in demand, and it would be extremely hardcore fucking over customers who had to have a phone in the period near the end of those terrible cycles by immediately making their phones obsolete.
If Tim Cook announced tomorrow that he had a proven cure for cancer and that he was also cutting the phone cadence from one year to five, he should be fired the same day. Annual updates are the only valid approach.