I'd really like a handheld programming device. I wonder how easy it is to write software with it.
Massive power consumption.. ? I've never seen it report more than 20W being discharged from the battery (this is easily found in the menu) even during gaming
>I wonder how easy it is to write software with it.
I'd call it borderline unusable for that unless you use a physical keyboard with it
For comparison, this is the same peek power consumption of the M1 base SoC. A debate could be had if the M1 would be faster overall (I don't think it would be in games if Rosetta is involved), but it's not going to lower power consumption.
Yes. All reviews I looked up complained about battery life. Some cited figures of 1-2 hours when playing demanding games. Is that wrong?
I assumed it had higher power consumption than the Apple M1 computers since they have a reputation for insane battety life. Not sure exactly how many watts they draw.
> I'd call it borderline unusable for that unless you use a physical keyboard with it
Well, I've written code using my phone... Can't be worse than that, can it?
You can also easily use a physical keyboard and mouse with the Steam Deck either through Bluetooth or any old USB C hub. Video out works too and it supports MST so it's possible to do multiple external monitors even though it has a single USB C port (can't be done with M1!). It has a full fledged desktop mode that's basically just a normal distro with KDE. By default you can't use pacman to install Arch packages but you can easily enable it if you want. Flatpaks are easily installable by default though.
I'm not sure M1 would be much more efficient playing AAA games either. Some of the battery life advantage is just the fact that they have more room for more battery.
Most early reviews wouldn't have taken that into account.
But also you have to consider that m1 macs don't offer you 8 zen3 cores and 8 rdna 2 gpu units. Apple device are notorious for being less powerful than the competition, but making it up in software, which you can't really do when the task is gaming, since that is basicaly as close as a full synthetic benchmark you can get.
Disregarding the arm/x86 compat layer that would be needed to play most games and its overhead, getting anywhere as close to steam deck framerate would probably take about 25 W worth of m1 chips. For 20 W, this thing is actually a beast. Like seriously, it runs Elden Ring (almost) well.
There is already a compatibility layer software-wise (Proton to run Windows games on Linux), adding one more compatibility layer for hardware this time will add more problems to run games.
So unfortunately until PC game developers massively start to support ARM architectures, we're stuck with x86.
No. All it needs is someone other than Apple to do what Apple did with the M1 - people have shown that you can run games perfectly fine in Rosetta [1].
[1] https://www.macwelt.de/ratgeber/Das-M1-Macbook-Pro-als-Gamin...
Yea. Not being able to play 99.9% of PC games due to only supporting 1 proprietary graphics API would be great.