Shoutout to Unlucky Steve who made this happen by paying $1000 to get one from the US a few minutes before the announcement.
Luckily we’ve had grey imports for a while that were pretty much only a few $100 more.
My Aussie friends didn’t have the steam deck?!?
They’re not hard to get, but you would pay $1200 AUD instead of $899 which is the retail for the 512GB OLED, for example.
Been telling folks for ages I’m not getting a steamdeck until I can give my money direct to valve.
Yeah that’s fair. I caved for the LCD and again the oled. Have probably overpaid $650 all up over the last 18 months but its a great device.
Do we have a rough idea for when the 2 will be coming? Id almost rather wait for newer hardware if it’s not too far off.
It’s probably a year or two out, at least. They want the Steam Deck 2 to be a proper power jump from the original, and there hasn’t been any significant hardware improvements that would allow that yet.
Other handhelds have more power, but they do that by dumping way more power into the chipset for increasingly small returns. It’s not really worth it to make a new Steam Deck with one of those chipsets because you would be trading off most of the battery life for any power increase.
Valve were really smart with the hardware selection. Pointless to put FHD resolution into a 7 inch screen size, means better performance and battery.
I wouldn’t hold out for a 2 necessarily. Not sure it’s gonna follow the console ~5 year release cycle
