I would honestly not worry too much.
The glue is a mother fucker, no arguments there. There ARE actually very good reasons for it but… it still sucks.
But as long as you aren’t going at it with a butter knife For Content, it is mostly just tedious. Get a plastic pryer/splitter and a heat gun and go to town. www.ifixit.com/Guide/…/149070 is the gold standard guide for that.
I’ve seen some solvents advertised for specifically this use case (remove glued in electronics parts) but I personally wouldn’t trust those without a LOT of reviews. Like, if it were that simple, ifixit and the like would already be selling it.
But also? I doubt it is going to be an issue outside of RMA-worthy problems. The days of batteries failing left and right are gone now that basically every device has logic to not over-charge or kill the zero. Think of the Steam Deck like a phone. It has a 2-6 year life cycle at which point it will be “weak enough” to not run anything remotely new and likely have a replacement with MUCH better everything (Valve best keep that audio jack though…). Now, PC gaming gets weird as I think my most played games at this point are Warframe and Dwarf Fortress (and that goes back to the curses only days…) but… yeah.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
I’ve been repairing crap like this for decades. I haven’t done the steam deck battery yet but already know an easy enough way to get it done.
Use a plastic playing card, and you may want to cut one in half so it isn’t as wide. Get a shallow bowl of 90 or higher iso alcohol to dip a bit of plastic playing card into.
Dip card, hold deck upside down so no access alcohol goes down into the lcd screen (avoids slight chance of issues) and start wedging the card under the battery to eat and peel away the adhesive. Just keep dipping and pushing the card under.