“Delay” is a weird term to use. It was never even hinted that there would be one soon.

Delay?? The original Deck isn’t even 2 years old yet.

deleted by creator

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.

The Steam Deck is fucking awesome, a refresh at this point would be ridiculous.

That argument that any SoC upgrade wouldn’t be noticeable right now is partially true. A better SoC can be fabricated, but that would offset any cost Valve would willing to accept given the current Steam Deck pricing.

It’s better to wait for what AMD creates. Surely they’re preparing new RDNA and ZEN architectures, plus TSMC new nodes. Those guys have an special sub-node to target low power devices, being the latest the one Apple eats every iPhone launch.

If they pushed a new Steam Deck, it would be marginally better and most folks wouldn’t be so compelled to upgrade. Also, you fragment your development team, now you have to maintain two devices.

Yeah, it’s better to wait a good timing when AMD and TSMC aligns, then you push forward and you offset the prior 4 year old model.

I don’t need a higher spec Steam Deck, most of what I play is all 2D indie games anyway. What I really want to see someday is a Steam Deck Pocket in a DS-sized form factor.