Some of that list like emulation and other stores would still come under the umbrella term of gaming to me.
Besides the full scope of gaming, I don’t use my steamdeck for anything else as I simply have other devices that are better suited to doing them than it is.
Realistically, we didn’t actually need our steamdeck either.
The updates are great and for those with an OG Steam Deck, they also bode well for the eventual Steam Deck 2 (that will be worth an upgrade) with the way they have addressed the most common complaints too, but there’s no way I will even start to rationalise an Oled despite own numerous handhelds already.
It probably comes down to supply being squeezed for a niche where people will often settle for a higher refresh lcd instead, for larger panels tv is obviously taking up supply and for smaller screens you have laptops taking up that side of the supply.
The thing that is encouraging to me is that this refresh has updated so many things that we as the userbase wanted to be improved, better display (including smaller bezels), better battery life etc which means that even with the timing being unfortunate for some people, it does bode well for any future Steamdeck releases if they keep such a focus on understanding what we want improving and how to do that in future products just as they have also done with SteamOS too.
For me, the changes are very nice and should help drive further sales, which benefits us all since it encourages support, but I won’t be upgrading since my steamdeck is still great and I will wait for an actual steam deck 2 rather than just a steam deck plus.
Beyond leaving it to others, the most obvious reasons for not wanting to get into a yearly cycle is that they will have performance increases in mind that they would want to see before it was worth the hassle to transition to a new model and even when they had a sufficient power jump they would still want to deliver battery life that was at least the equal of the current steamdeck.
While they may struggle to compete at the high end, the idea that they will drop RDNA when it helps so many other areas such as their APUs in laptops and handhelds, console APUs and AI GPUs even without them making as large inroads on the desktop as they might like just seems like such a flawed premise. If they continue to make progress with RDNA then the thing that might not stick around would be the low end dgpu as there will be no point to them if your igpu can easily deliver playable 1080p.
Reveals it’s next step in promoting Firefox.