Personally I’m hoping 1030 isn’t even a Deck. Putting the Deck internals in a set-top box with better cooling and lots of I/O would make an amazing competitor to PS5/XSX and a straight upgrade to XSS, and they could price it a lot cheaper than the Deck because they wouldn’t need to put a screen or battery in (and they could make it even cheaper by selling it without a controller since it works with Xbox/PS/Nintendo ones already).
Steam Machines failed the first time, but now that the Deck has gotten a lot of people comfortable with (a vastly improved) SteamOS there’s no reason to think they’d fail again, especially if Valve themselves were putting out the flagship “standard” unit that companies like ASUS could iterate on.
Personally I’m hoping 1030 isn’t even a Deck. Putting the Deck internals in a set-top box with better cooling and lots of I/O would make an amazing competitor to PS5/XSX and a straight upgrade to XSS, and they could price it a lot cheaper than the Deck because they wouldn’t need to put a screen or battery in (and they could make it even cheaper by selling it without a controller since it works with Xbox/PS/Nintendo ones already).
Steam Machines failed the first time, but now that the Deck has gotten a lot of people comfortable with (a vastly improved) SteamOS there’s no reason to think they’d fail again, especially if Valve themselves were putting out the flagship “standard” unit that companies like ASUS could iterate on.