Everything Should Be As Easy to Upgrade As the Steam Deck - Wired

Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzmod to Steam Deck@sopuli.xyz – 494 points –
Everything Should Be As Easy to Upgrade As the Steam Deck
wired.com

I doubt this is news to anyone here, but always good to see positive coverage of the Deck

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Valve employees have said in interviews that they didn't want the battery glued down, but that with the battery expanding and shrinking during use they couldn't keep it from rattling around unless they glued it down. Other companies have managed this, so it's not an impossible issue. However it wasn't something valve was able to easily solve.

As far as hall effect joysticks go, I'm not going to complain when none of the modern first party console controllers come with hall-effect. Microsoft and Sony have pro controllers for $150-200 that don't come with hall effect sensors. Valve making the thumbsticks easily replaceable is enough imo. Things could be much worse, the Asus Ally uses the same type of thumbsticks as Nintendo Joycons for example.

with the battery expanding and shrinking during use they couldn't keep it from rattling around unless they glued it down.

I’ve never designed mobile hardware, but it seems like the easy fix for that would be to glue the battery to a thin backplane and then screw the backplane down; then people could just replace the battery+backplane as a single unit…

(ETA: but I’ll take a Steam Deck with a non-replaceable battery over any of the existing competition any day.)

What is the battery glues to? Can’t that entire piece just be replaced?

Sounds like a simple piece of foam or a spring lever would work.

You know what can handle expanding and shrinking and hold things in place? Foam, or I'm sure a dozen other solutions engineers have come up with for this problem over the last 50+ years.

That's what I was thinking. Like is velcro no longer a thing either?

I really wish they were able to solve the battery issue. I bought my Deck like a week ago and battery is something that usually goes with time.

I'm glad to hear an explanation as to why the battery is as glued as aggressively.

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