I mean, say you have something in stock that others sell for twice as much as last week and it will cost you twice as much to restock, why would you sell it for last weeks prices?
Why would it matter if you have anything in stock or not? What does it matter what you've paid for it?
If it will be hard to restock and ill most likely will have to sell "no" ill be even more motivated to ask more for it.
Any leads on when the next generation of Steam Deck will be released? Hoping it could be sometime in 2025, but suspect it will be more like 2026.
Over the holidays I was playing GTA: San Andreas on a Nintendo Switch. It's fun but so underpowered for a game released in 2004 (Yes, 21 years ago! Damn..). I'm really craving something more.
As a sidenote, it's really cool Valve allows installing SteamOS on any hardware. There are some alternative comparable form-factor devices:
* Lenovo Legion Go S
* Asus ROG Ally
But I have yet to see any of these in real life, so not sure how good or bad they really are.
It won't be for a while, since Valve is releasing the Steam Machine next year and has commented that they are waiting until they can build a Steam Deck successor that is significantly better than the original.[1] My guess is 2027.
Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what you get and for what it can do. I'm no expert, but I do pay as close attention as I can to what's going on with gaming hardware because of my limited budget, and I'm guessing Steam Deck 2 is more like Q1 2028, not any time sooner. I'm ok with that. I play all the games I want on my Steam Deck OLED, and I see plenty of life left in it, even this "late" in the game.
> Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what you get and for what it can do
I'm still kind of flabbergasted that we're in a world where the cheapest Steam Deck model literally costs less than the Switch 2. Sure, neither of them are exactly powerhouses as far as console hardware goes, but at least on one of them you literally can just use the system however you want as a desktop OS as a bonus...
I would assume Steam Deck 2 isn't dropping before at least H2 2026, if not later, if they didn't bring it out with the announcement of the other devices.
Valve's only official statement as far as I know is that it will come when they see a significant enough hardware upgrade to warrant a new system. If they don't move to ARM, AMD's Medusa APUs are their next architecture with major upgrades, so I would guess that Valve would order another custom AMD chip but based on Medusa, which won't release until at least 2027. I would guess at least H2 2027 but probably early 2028 for an AMD-based Steam Deck 2.
I would be surprised if they moved to ARM any time soon, because even if the CPUs can punch that hard, they're definitely not competing on the GPU front, from what I understand of the state of the art outside of Apple, so they're gonna wind up with a dGPU anyway if they did.
Maybe my knowledge is out of date, but I'd be kind of surprised if a Snapdragon can get anywhere near competing with even the existing Steam Deck on GPU performance. Looking at [1] for a ballpark number on Snapdragon GPU performance doesn't seem encouraging.
Does ARM support PCIe, by the way? Or has no one combined ARM with a dGPU because it's ridiculous to combine a low-voltage CPU with a space heater from Nvidia?
The PCI bus has nothing to do with the instruction set. Usually it is just a block a designer can add to a chip, and connect to an internal bus like AXI, give or take a few other adjustments on the chip.
You can have PCIe buses without proper CPUs, even: it's quite common to find them paired with FPGAs.
For instance, Rasberry Pis have had a PCI bus for a few generations now, at first used for USB3. The Pi 5 breaks it out on a dedicated connector, making it easy to plug external devices: https://raspberrytips.com/pcie-raspberry-pi5/ (random link).
Of course, discrete GPUs are less ideal from a power efficiency perspective (duplicated memory controller, buses, and power circuits), so they wouldn't fit the Steam Deck. But write a big enough check, and I'm sure that AMD or Intel would be willing to share their iGPU designs. NVidia also makes Tegras.
Valve has said they want at least double the capabilities, while still fitting in a similar power envelope. Unsaid is that it also needs to fit in the same price budget, but I tend to believe that's their intent. It's gonna be a while. Valve got a stellar deal on some somewhat unusual Zen2 APUs, orginally built for Magic Leap; finding a similar good deal is going to take time. I sort of hope Valve isnt going to put out a $1600 Halo system (but probably would buy such a next-gen Gorgon Halo system). Maybe Gorgon Point is good enough for them, in which case yeah 2026H2 is reasonable.
Are you aware that the year is 2025, and that it is 92.2% over? There is next to no chance of a Deck2 this year. I would really really not hold my breath for 2026 either.
I recently bought a Legion Go S because the primary way I game nowadays is streaming from my desktop to a handheld, and the higher quality display (1900x1200 resolution with 120 Hz over the 1280x800 and 90 Hz on the Steam Deck OLED) seemed worthwhile given that my desktop can easily provide enough throughput to play with relatively high graphics settings. It came with SteamOS preinstalled, and from a software perspective, everything does seem pretty close to identical. The only things I've slightly missed from the Steam Deck are slight hardware nits with the Legion Go S; the placement of the equivalent of the two SteamOS-specific buttons (not sure exactly how to refer to them, but they're labeled "Steam" and "..." on the Deck) just above the Start and Select buttons while looking and feeling the same mixes me up sometimes in a way that never happened on the Deck, and I miss having four unmapped buttons on the back of the device that I can set up however I like in games rather than only two. I also tend to prefer having symmetrical thumbsticks higher up on the device rather than having one high and one low; I've noticed that my hands aren't quite as comfortable when using the D-pad for extended amounts of time, which is unfortunate given my preference for it when playing stuff like emulated GBA games (incidentally one of the few things I tend to do locally instead of streaming; the low power profile setting already is an easy battery life win when streaming, and in practice it make the battery life when GBA emulation also much more tolerable, along with keeping the fans much quieter without seeming to impact performance of the emulation, given that even with this setting the fast-forward function can go far faster than I'd ever need it to).
If you're considering getting an alternative handheld, a better OS would be either Bazzite or CachyOS Handheld edition. SteamOS is not bad, but it uses an older kernel+graphics stack which doesn't make it very ideal for running on recent hardware. Plus, dedicated gaming distros like Bazzite have additional hardware support (like thirdparty game controllers) which may not be supported in SteamOS.
Currently, AMD Strix Halo based handhelds are the most powerful portable gaming devices out there, with the top three being the GPD Win 5, the OneXPlayer OneXfly Apex, and the AYANEO Next 2. Of these three, the GPD Win 5 has already started shipping. Problem is they're stupid expensive.
Personally, I will wait until I can run FSR4 natively on these portables, because FSR makes a pretty significant QoL improvement on these handhelds.
FWIW it's fairly straightforward to set up FSR4 with Proton-GE nowadays, assuming you're comfortable with editing one config file or manually specifying an env var for the game[1]. I'm not sure if using an alternate version of Proton would be considered "native" though, or if you mean for the default version of proton (or for Linux builds of games specifically), but setting it up is a fairly straightforward process even for people who might prefer not to use the terminal if you use something like ProtonUp to manage the installation for you. I imagine that the process for using a custom Proton isn't much different on Bazzite and CachyOS, although I'm not sure whether it would be something commonly done on CachyOS given that they have their own Proton distribution.
I wouldn't be surprised if they don't. Valve don't want to sell hardware, they want to sell games. They only make hardware as flagships for new markets, then they want other hardware manufacturers to take over.
the legion go is more powerful and a has a nice screen, but is heavier, boxier, and has a worse batteyr life than the steam deck
Valves moving into hardware more than ever right now, not moving away from it. They've already sand multiple times a deck 2 is on the cards, but only when theres enough of a hardware bump to make it make sense as a product. Slapping a tiny bit newer cpu in there and calling it a Steam Deck 2 isn't what Valve are about.
They definitely are working on it. They announced the steam machine, steam controller, and the valve frame (standalone vr headset with seamless screen sharing from a PC), and in their reveal video the first thing they rather coyly say is “we’d love to share information about our next Steam deck, but that’s for another day!” and announce a bunch of other cool stuff.
I thought the same until I calculated that newer hardware consumes a few times less energy and for something running 24x7 that adds up quite a bit (I live in Europe, energy is quite expensive).
So my homelab equipment is just 5 years old and it will get replaced in 2-3 years with something even more power efficient.
Asking coz I just did a quick comparison and it seems to depend but for comparison I have a really old AMD Athlon "e" processor (like literally September 2009 is when it came out according to some quick Google search, tho I probably bought it a few months later than that but still ...) that runs at ~45W TDP. In idle conditions, it typically consumes around 10 to 15 watts (internet wisdom, not kill-a-watt-wisdom).
Some napkin math says it would cost me about 40 years worth of amortization to replace this at my current power rates for this system. So why would I replace it? And even with some EU countries' power rates we seem to be at 5-10 years amortization upon replacement. I've been running this motherboard, CPU + RAM combo for ~15 years now it seems, replacing only the hard drives every ~3 years. And the tower it's in is about 25 years old.
Oh I forgot, I think I had to buy two new CR2032 batteries during those years (CMOS battery).
Now granted, this processor can basically do "nothing" in comparison to a current system I might buy. But I also don't need more for what it does.
That is definitely true and why I compared idle watts. That Athlon uses the same idle watts as modern mobile CPUs. So no reason to replace during the mostly idle times. Spot on. I can't have this system off during idle time as it wouldn't come up to fulfill its purpose fast enough when needed and it would be a pain to trigger that anyway (I mean, really, port knocking to start up that system type thing). Else I would. That I do do with the HTPC which has a more modern Intel core i3.
The "nothing" here was exactly meant more for the times when it does have to do something. But even then at 45W TDP, as long as it's able to do what it needs to, then the newer CPUs have no real edge. What they gain in performance due to multi core they loose in being essentially equivalent single core performance for what that machine does: HTPC file serving, email server etc.
Spinning rust and fans are the outliers when it comes to longevity in compute hardware. I’ve had to replace a disk or two in my rack at home, but at the end of the day the CPUs, RAM, NICs, etc. all continue to tick along just fine.
When it comes to enterprise deployments, the lifecycle always revolves around price/performance. Why pay for old gear that sucks up power and runs 30% slower than the new hotness, after all!
But, here we are, hitting limits of transistor density. There’s a reason I still can’t get 13th or 14th gen poweredge boxes for the price I paid for my 12th gen ones years ago.
There’s no marginal tax impact of discarding it or not after 5 years - if it was still net useful to keep it powered, they would keep it. Depreciation doesn’t demand you dispose of or sell the item to see the tax benefit.
No but it tips the scales. If the new hardware is a little more efficient, but perhaps not so much so that you would necessarily replace it, the ability to appreciate the new stuff, but not the old stuff might tip your decision
This was my conclusion, too! Over time as agentic coders get better at handling higher-complexity tasks, this kind of bracing will become less and less necessary.
> 1. Economic strain (investment as a share of GDP)
> 2. Industry strain (capex to revenue ratios)
> 3. Revenue growth trajectories (doubling time)
> 4. Valuation heat (price-to-earnings multiples)
> 5. Funding quality (the resilience of capital sources)
> His analysis shows that AI remains in a demand-led boom rather than a bubble, but if two of the five gauges head into red, we will be in bubble territory.
This seems like a more quantitative approach than most of "the sky is falling", "bubble time!", "circular money!" etc analyses commonly found on HN and in the news. Are there other worthwhile macro-economic indicators to look at?
It's fascinating how challenging it is meaningfully compare current recent events to prior economic cycles such as the y2k tech bubble. It seems like it should be easy but AFAICT it barely even rhymes.
Besides your chart, another point along these lines is that the article cites Azhar claiming multiples are not in bubble territory while also mentioning Murati getting essentially infinite price multiple. Hmmmm...
The couch fascinate me the most because it's almost justifiable. Like offices need furniture and grand openings should be nice; however the cost could never be recovered and the company was way too big to be doing things that don't scale.
In a similar vein, LLM's/AI are clearly impressive technologies that can be done profitably. Spending billions on a model however may not be economically feasible. It's a great example of runaway spending, whereas the weed thing feels more along the lines of a drug problem to me.
Maybe, there are a few different things named "Codex" from OpenAI (yes, needlessly confusing) - "Codex" is a git-centric product, the other is the GPT-5-Codex agentic coder model. I recommend installing the Codex CLI if you're able to and selecting the model via `/model`.
TFA mentions that if Samsung and SK Hynix had known what shenanigans were underway, they would have pursued better pricing terms.
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