Understandable.

What I will say though is that I personally wouldn't mind regular spec bumps at all. The Deck isn't exactly a cheap device and to get the "latest and greatest" for your "investment" at any given point of purchase would help longevity.

But as I said, in this case it makes a lot of sense (for Valve). SteamOS is still under heavy development, even more basic stuff such as the update mechanism and also power management is something they're still working to improve.

They also use a custom APU designed in collaboration with AMD, and these designs cost a lot of money. It's not just a rebranded 7840U like the Z1 Extreme for example. This custom design makes a lot of sense in terms of focusing on gaming performance and efficiency, and it clearly shows in (very) power limited scenarios.

Either way, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a new Steam Deck based on Zen 5 and RDNA 4 with another custom designed APU sometime in 2025 or early 2026. Zen 2 is really starting to show its age and Zen 5 is a solid leap even over Zen 4 (not talking about desktop CPUs here, but Ryzen AI 300). RDNA 4 will likely improve quite a bit over RDNA 3(.5) (with the current Deck having RDNA 2) and include some type of hardware-accelerated machine learning upscaling with FSR4, which could make a lot of sense on the Deck as long as enough games support it.

I'd also like to see a few other improvements. The OLED display is great in many aspects, but VRR would be a great feature to have. Internally I'd like to see an easier way to swap the battery, maybe using similar tech to what Apple does with the iPhone 16's battery. Currently, swapping the battery is one of the most complex repairs on the Deck, but it'll also be the most common a few years down the line when all these batteries really start to show their age.

I think we'll get at least one more x86 Steam Deck generation before it moves to ARM (if it moves to ARM at all).

The Snapdragon X isn't anything to write home about when it comes to efficiency under load, with the newest CPUs (with iGPUs) from AMD and Intel keeping up or maybe even exceeding it.

Happy cake day!

Bitwarden keeps working just fine.

I'm no expert here, but I'm pretty sure branch prediction logic is not part of the instruction set, so I don't see how RISC alone would "fix" these types of issues.

I think you have to go back 20-30 years to get CPUs without branch prediction logic. And VSCodium is quite the resource hog (as is the modern web), so good luck with that.

Restaurants und Unterkünfte zu finden ist das einzige, wofür ich Google Maps überhaupt noch verwende. Zum orientieren und navigieren ist die App mir mittlerweile viel zu überladen.

Wenn die Bewertungen jetzt auch nicht mehr stimmen, weil die kritischen gelöscht werden, dann fliegt es eben bald ganz runter.

Watch it still make more money than all PC games combined.

Meaning up to 28 GB for the Air as well?

Can't you store them in a cache that keeps images that have been accessed in the last 48 hours (or whatever) and deletes others? Should someone request these images after that, cache them again for 48 hours.

Das Hauptproblem ist bei alten oder weniger bekannten Geräten meistens die Verfügbarkeit von Ersatzteilen.

"Spezialwerkzeug" braucht man in den wenigsten Fällen. Einmal ein umfangreiches Bit-Set gekauft, dazu vielleicht noch einen Saugnapf, die ein oder andere Pinzette oder "Schaber" und du hast für die meisten Smartphones, Konsolen, Notebooks usw. schon alles an Werkzeug, was benötigt wird. Bei iFixit gibt es da preiswerte und sinnvolle Sets, die qualitativ auch locker ausreichen.

Du brauchst bspw. nicht unbedingt eine spezielle Maschine, die den Kleber vom Rand des iPhone Display löst. Ein 30 Cent Saugnapf und ein Haartrockner oder ein Wärmekissen aus der Mikrowelle tun es auch.

Ich denke Akkutausch ist mit die gängigste Reparatur und je nach Gerät muss man etwas Zeit mitbringen, aber viel schlimmer als 2 Drähte ab- und anlöten habe ich noch nicht erlebt. Das "schwierigste" ist hier meistens eher, einen halbwegs seriösen Drittanbieter zu finden, der gescheite Akkus herstellt.

"Per Software zerstört" kenne ich jetzt nur von Sonos.

I always hear power efficiency as an argument that ARM chips are magically better at, but Ryzen AI 300 and Intel Core Ultra 200V series seem to be very competitive with Qualcomm's offering. It's hard to compare 1:1 as the same chip in different laptops can be configured very differently in terms of TDP and power curves and the efficiency "sweet spots" aren't the same for all these different chips. Core Ultra 200V is also awaiting more thorough testing, but it seems to be right up there with the Snapdragon.

I honestly found the Snapdragon X very underwhelming after all that marketing of how much better it was than Apple's M3 and Intel's and AMD's offerings. By the time the Snapdragon was actually available in end-user products, AMD's and Intel's competing generations were right around the corner and we've also seen a vastly improved M4 chip (although only in an iPad so far, so meh). Add to that the issues that you'll encounter because while Windows' x86 to ARM translation layer has certainly improved, it's nowhere near as seamless as what Apple did.

Sorry, I don't know of a guide for other distributions.

To me it felt like previous Windows on ARM attempts: promised a lot, released with problems (mainly compatibility this time), then quickly forgotten because x86 chips caught up anyway.

See you in 2-3 years!

While I mostly agree with your first paragraph, I don't see Nintendo as the innocent and awesome third player. They are certainly doing well in terms of sales numbers right now, but they've proven time and time again that they're hostile towards their fanbase (and I'm not talking about pirated games here).

I also don't see how the Switch brought a "fresh, intuitive control scheme" to the table. The hybrid console concept was the first well implemented take and quite a few people certainly like that flexibility, but in my opinion the best way to play Switch is on a TV with a bunch of "Pro" controllers.

And in terms of games, I think Nintendo makes consistently good games (for the most part), but most of them are also very safe bets. You have your 2D platformer Mario games, 3D platformer Mario games, some fighting and sports Mario game spin-offs (again, nothing new), and a bunch of games set in the Zelda universe. Splatoon was something else, but we're at Splatoon 3 by now as well. I personally thought Mario Maker was the most "revolutionary" title in somewhat recent times. I enjoyed some of these games especially for their coop (or pvp) experiences, but there wasn't much in there that truly surprised me.

YMMV of course, I know a lot of people absolutely loved the Zelda games for the Switch for example. Nintendo games are also pretty much feature-complete out of the box, which isn't something you can say for a lot of these live service games popping up everywhere.

I personally think indie games or games from "large-but-based" studios are more important than ever and that's where I got the most original and memorable experiences from in recent years.

Nvidia might be selling the shovels to the customer during this gold rush, but TSMC is making them.

This being displayed as "Unknown" is likely just a bug or an app you (very) recently uninstalled. And you probably opened the camera app by accidentally swiping right to left on the lock screen. Even just a slight swipe will launch the app so it's ready when you're done swiping.

And I'm not even sure what you're talking about regarding your QR code.

Android is not de facto superior to iOS, nor is the opposite the case.

If you're really that paranoid, even GrapheneOS on a Pixel shouldn't calm you down because it also requires proprietary firmware by Google (and possibly other vendors) to run on these proprietary devices. In this case my advice would be to stop using smartphones altogether and rely on open source computers (couple of RISC-V options out there I think) for your computing needs.

Yes! Can I haz pancakes too?

Pretty calm here for a "panic".

I was surprised until I saw the spec sheet. The A17 Pro in the iPad mini has a 5-core GPU as opposed to the 6-core GPU the iPhone 15 Pro has with the chip.

So the iPad mini features a binned version of the A17 Pro chip, and Apple likely has quite a few of them piled up as they only ever sold fully functional A17 Pro chips so far. The N3B process didn't have the best of yields to chips with partial defects would've likely been quite common.

Combine that with the likely lower volume sales of the mini compared to larger iPads (and obviously iPhones) and Apple can probably sell the mini for a couple of years without needing to produce new A17 Pro chips.

So it actually makes a lot of sense. Makes me wonder what they'll put in the next regular iPad though.

Not really, just some wording..?