Pretty much. I went from a Commodore Vic-20 to a Tandy 1000TX in around a decade. I’m decommissioning a desktop that was cheap 10 years ago. It gets the job done, and you can play Minecraft on it. A game I played first about 13 years ago. I just got around to (mostly) finishing Fallout: New Vegas, a game over ten years old.

Even if the bleeding edge is improving, the quantitative improvement in the number of bits pushed through a graphic card is nothing like the qualitative change from CGA to EGA, or even to VGA. I remember around the time of SVGA and it’s Amiga quality graphics (16 million colours!) thinking that even if processing power was improving, it would mostly go towards frame rates, on the fly rendering, and miniaturization.

Add in the slowing down of Moore’s Law, you have to ask what would a Steam Deck 2 do that the existing Steam Deck doesn’t do? Marginally better screen resolution, marginally better battery life? I’m playing No Man’s Sky with the frame rate locked to 30fps. A hypothetical SD 2 that let me get 60 or even 120 fps might be nice, but that covers nowhere near being able to play NMS anywhere on the go.

Between the ROG Ally, the Legion, and Aya and GPD, I think there is lots of competition emerging in this form factor, but I think Steam is on the right track. Support the SD1 for a few years at least.