Deck is very DIY friendly, including potential repairs. So it should be fairly safe to assume that it work just as new unit - especially coming from Valve itself.
They have to say not to open so that they aren't liable for people breaking it when opening it. Some aspects of the hardware are hard to work with, like replacing the battery, but joysticks and screens (the main things I would expect people to need to repair) are surprisingly easy to access for a modern portable device.
After cracking open my own Deck, replacing the SSD or Thumb sticks is dirt simple. There are even drop in Hall effect sticks you can get. The only real trouble is if you need to replace the battery. The screen and battery are definitely the hardest things to replace in the Steam Deck.
PS: REMOVE THE MICROSD FIRST! I've seen people forget their card is in there and literally snap it in half when opening up their Steam Deck.
The only thing you really need to worry about is the metal heat shield removal since it is moved before the battery is unplugged, but after that it's pretty safe
That's nice to see. I recently RMAd mine and was sent a new one. Mine definitely wasn't unfixable, but I think would've taken longer than Valve would prefer. I hope it gets refurbished and sold instead of just trashed.
I was seduced, though the last time I played a PC game was somewhen in the 90s. Thought to get into that steam thing. Opened an account, ordered the steam deck, had the account blocked for fraud, my order cancelled, was not eager to share my ID with steam. Aaand still don't own one. Now I am just not up for it anymore. Maybe you can take that route.
I want one. It's a lot easier for me to start up a gaming session on the couch with a handheld without much fuss than on my computer at my desk. There are a lot of games I'd play more this way.
I, for one, would actually be fine with buying a Steam Deck at that price just so that way Steam/Valve have incentive to continue their work on Proton (their answer to try and get unsupported games working on Linux and their own official SteamOS).
The trade-off of giving them incentive to work on Proton, which would help an estimated roughly 2.5 million "monthly active users" using Steam on Linux definitely seems reasonable to me at least.
Can anybody comment on how worth it is for the ones with better screens? I get the value of the larger size, but I'm happy with the 64gb plus sd card - I just have fomo if the screens make a difference.
You mean the anti-glare one on the most expensive version? I would say it's a nice addition but nothing revolutionary. It really makes it nicer to play in sunlight, but it is making colors a little bit darker. I don't feel much of a difference with colors, however. But I would say just for the screen, the price hike is not worth it. And remember - it's not something that a screen protector can't do, I think you can buy one with the anti-glare protection.
Hmm, I may actually pull the trigger on one of these, then. Is there any benefit to the higher capacity units if I can just pop in an SD card? I assume they can store games on the cards?
I have a 64gb with a large sd card. My recommendation is to get a 256gb. You will feel space starved with installing different versions of Proton, the shader cache(?), and the emulated Window's user folders.
If you get the 64gb you basically have to get an sd card. If you get bigger then you might not ever have to if you play relatively small games and you don't mind managing installed games.
Yeah, that would be the plan. I did the same thing with my Switch and it just automatically uses it as additional storage without any fuss. Does the Steam Deck do the same thing?