Include adding kernel level anti cheat to that. This should just give us an option to get a full refund.

iFixit rates it “Difficult” for the Steam Deck OLED and says the time required is 2-3 hours:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+OLED+Battery+Replacement/168676

This is a slight improvement from the original Deck’s estimated 2-4 hours:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+Battery+Replacement/149070

It requires removing quite a few parts but the most annoying part is getting rid of the adhesive. It doesn’t have easy-to-access pull tabs or whatever.

They can certainly improve this. Either add pull tabs to the adhesive strips, or better yet use the mechanism from the iPhone 16 where you apply voltage to the adhesive to make dissolve/no longer stick. Or even better make it a screw-in battery without any glue whatsoever. Then update the routing of several cables so they aren’t in the way of removing the battery.

Understandable.

What I will say though is that I personally wouldn’t mind regular spec bumps at all. The Deck isn’t exactly a cheap device and to get the “latest and greatest” for your “investment” at any given point of purchase would help longevity.

But as I said, in this case it makes a lot of sense (for Valve). SteamOS is still under heavy development, even more basic stuff such as the update mechanism and also power management is something they’re still working to improve.

They also use a custom APU designed in collaboration with AMD, and these designs cost a lot of money. It’s not just a rebranded 7840U like the Z1 Extreme for example. This custom design makes a lot of sense in terms of focusing on gaming performance and efficiency, and it clearly shows in (very) power limited scenarios.

Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a new Steam Deck based on Zen 5 and RDNA 4 with another custom designed APU sometime in 2025 or early 2026. Zen 2 is really starting to show its age and Zen 5 is a solid leap even over Zen 4 (not talking about desktop CPUs here, but Ryzen AI 300). RDNA 4 will likely improve quite a bit over RDNA 3(.5) (with the current Deck having RDNA 2) and include some type of hardware-accelerated machine learning upscaling with FSR4, which could make a lot of sense on the Deck as long as enough games support it.

I’d also like to see a few other improvements. The OLED display is great in many aspects, but VRR would be a great feature to have. Internally I’d like to see an easier way to swap the battery, maybe using similar tech to what Apple does with the iPhone 16’s battery. Currently, swapping the battery is one of the most complex repairs on the Deck, but it’ll also be the most common a few years down the line when all these batteries really start to show their age.

I think we’ll get at least one more x86 Steam Deck generation before it moves to ARM (if it moves to ARM at all).

The Snapdragon X isn’t anything to write home about when it comes to efficiency under load, with the newest CPUs (with iGPUs) from AMD and Intel keeping up or maybe even exceeding it.

Missing built-in FDE is one of my main gripes with SteamOS. It’s why I don’t really do anything besides gaming on the Deck. It’s a portable device that could easily be stolen or lost, so this seems like a major oversight.

youtube.com/tv is/was the YouTube website optimized for big screens. It’s basically just a different layout for regular YouTube.

OP is talking about YouTube and I can watch 8KUHD just fine on Linux.

Will reflash my Deck once this hits stable as it’s acting up in various different ways.

And what would that help with?

Would be interesting to know what actually happens.

I don’t think the Deck HD is ideal as UI scaling is also off with the Deck’s UI (unless Valve also supports 150% fractional scaling with their update), but battery life would only be affected in a meaningful way when the game is actually rendered in a higher resolution.

Having a higher resolution target for upscaling with FSR(2) can lead to (slightly) improved image quality even with the same internal resolution and obviously sharper UI. 2D games should look great with the higher pixel density (though at the cost of battery life in this case).

From their own FAQ:

We ran both SD’s on GTA V single player mode with a FPS cap at 30 starting from 100% charge. Both SD’s had the same brightness level and resolution (800p). The testing duration lasted just under 3 hours when DeckHD’s SD turned off when the original SD had 3% battery left.

So just having more pixels to render the UI with or whatever doesn’t really change much. 3% is within margin of error.

I doubt it’s possible to fit a smaller-bezel screen in the LCD’s case.

The touch screen is supposedly a lot better and the color reproduction obviously is as well.

If you need a replacement anyway, I don’t see why you shouldn’t get a better replacement for a similar price to the original anti-glare screen, especially now that Valve starts “officially” supporting it. If you’re looking for a bigger upgrade instead of a replacement because you need a repair, selling your working LCD Deck and upgrading to the OLED model is probably the better option.

I meant more as a replacement option if your original screen is already broken.

While replacing the display is quite complex in comparison to other repairs on the Deck, you may as well get this display should yours break for some reason.