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

    • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzOPM
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          There’s a massive difference between being able to get the quantity to serve the small number of people willing to tinker and buy niche controllers and being able to get the quantity to serve a mass market.

            • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              It’s not cheaper if the manufacturing capacity literally doesn’t exist. You can’t just wave a magic wand and have a company be capable of making millions of units.

              Edit: It took several months after launch to clear the backlog and allow people to just order a Steam Deck, and it got occasionally backordered for several more months in some markets after that. Adding the constraint of being supply limited on joysticks would have almost definitely made that worse.

            • klay@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Dude, no need to be a dick about it. You made your point, the dunk undermines it.

      • 995a3c3c3c3c2424@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        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.)

        • M500@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

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

      • Astroturfed@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • lobut@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • thejevans@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Let’s also not forget that PCBs were supposed to be available, but Valve never released the calibration tools, so they were never offered.

      • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzOPM
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        1 year ago

        My understanding on why the motherboard was never made available is because it was going to be sold for $350, and it wasn’t worth selling a repair part for that much when you can buy a new 64GB deck for $50 more.

    • mctoasterson@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      Good points and well taken. For what it is worth I have probably 1000 hours on my Deck since purchase and the springs in the sticks seem a little worn (subjective feel) but I haven’t had any drift issues yet.

      If it becomes an issue I will get hall effect sticks and replace them as a wear item like tires on a car.

    • HRDS_654@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I want to start out by saying I agree with everything you said, but I want to clarify by pointing out that Valve did trying to have a free floating battery but didn’t like how the console felt during testing. While they could have made a compartment I imagine the added weight and bulk (due to the battery shape) would not have been worth it.