When Valve announced the Steam Deck back in 2021, it attached an attractive $399 price tag to the handheld gaming device’s starting configuration. While this edition has gone through some changes since then, like upgrading the 64GB storage from eMMC to 256GB of NVMe, the price has remained the same. However, Valve is finally letting go of this cheapest model.
It makes some sense, the parts cost on the lower priced models could be a lot more painful.
I’m not gonna try to do a proper estimate on build prices on the Steam Deck, but the price of 16GB of DDR5 RAM was around $40 or even less a year ago and now we’re looking at $140. If that’s comparable here, that makes the margin look a lot rougher.