Recently I realized I had 350 dollars worth of CSGO creates sitting in my inventory. So I bought a steam deck. I’m a game developer so I have a desktop with a 1080 and 64 GB of ram, a desktop with a 4070 and 64 GB of ram. A laptop with a 1660 and 16 GB of ram, and now a Steam deck with 64 GB of storage and a 1 tb micro sd. I use my Steam deck rarely at most. I have so many devices I don’t really need a Steam deck but I had enough to get the Steam deck and honestly, I probably would have bought 350 dollars worth of games but I thought the investment in hardware would help me test games for Steam deck compatibility. Besides it’s something to add to my collection.
Overall, I don’t use it though. I don’t even really use my laptop. If I am going to play games I usually do so on one of my desktops. Also, I will say I think I made the mistake of not dishing out 200 more dollars for the 512 GB version that comes with an anti-glare screen. The load times for micro SDs are really long and I am surprised they only support UHS-I instead of something faster. The anti-glare screen also helps it be a more viable device as I’m likely to use it in the car on road trips or someplace like the living room where we keep the curtains open.
I also didn’t realize it got so hot. I wouldn’t really want to give the device to my kids to play. My oldest is 5 and he loves the Nintendo Switch but we don’t have a ton of games for it. I’d love to give him my steam deck to mess around with but the deck seems fragile and gets extremely hot compared to the switch or even his Samsung A7 tablet. I wouldn’t want him to feel the back of the Deck, get burnt, and drop it or get scared of it. It’s really not a young-kid-friendly device like I thought it might be.
Closing thoughts, I got the hardware essentially for free and I like it. It’s a great little device and I certainly love messing around with Steam OS in desktop mode. It’s a cool little experiment. I feel like if I was a consumer I’d likely would have been a bit disappointed with the 64 GB version. It might be worth it to pop it open and install a better drive in it someday but I’ll stick with the slow SD card for now. Most of the time I use I’m just trying to waste time anyways.