Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

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Sounds like Magic Leap "overspent" on a custom chip design and fab, like they overspent on everything else, and ended up with a fraction of the sales they expected.

And then Valve "underspent" (although perhaps more of an MVP) by taking an existing good-enough chip, perhaps able to get very good yield out of fab (at a time when fabs were costing a fortune), and found yet another corner to cut on a device that is overall pretty low build quality, to hit an aggressive price point. I love my Steam Deck, and I loved the low price, but the build quality is "good enough" at best.

Valve have reversed course with the new generation, having a custom chip now that they've proved out the demand, and I expect the device will improve across the board as they take advantage of higher volumes, and perhaps an ability to price a little higher too.

I wouldn't be surprised if Magic Leap also reverse course (or already have done? are they still around?) by moving to much cheaper off the shelf or pre-existing hardware.

How amazing it is to live in a world that has reached such level of quality that the deck is labelled as "good enough".

We are really swiming in astoninishing objects, even the simplest glass or a ball pen is a marvel.

So much it's now a baseline.

The Steam Deck is really the most delightful electronic device I've ever owned. It's incredible.

Right? I don’t consider it merely “good enough”, it’s actually really well-executed and of a surprisingly high quality. Probably the most meaningful tech purchase I’ve made since my MacBook Pro in 2014, in terms of direct positive effect on my life and my time spent with it. Maybe the Fujifilm X-T2 could be a contender there too, but I don’t do a lot of photography, so… But anyways, the Steam Deck hardware, design, and well-integrated OS, is really impressive to me.

> pretty low build quality

At the same time having a very high reparability. I feel like these two metrics are complementary and I am happy that they went for reparability instead.

> At the same time having a very high reparability

If you exclude the awful glued battery with the audio cable taped on it.

more recent lcd models has the cable on top of the battery and it isn't glued

I hear the second steam deck is repairable, but the first one is not.

The main things that break - buttons, need to be factory replaced and calibrated because the track pads are on the same boards.

> taking an existing good-enough chip

As Nintendo did with the Switch, which has been an overwhelming success. The Steam Deck is the Switch for Valve, both technologically and as a business/marketing point of view.

In other words, Valve pulled a Raspberry Pi.

I don't know much about the Raspberry Pi situation. Are they using existing designs? Are they doing things like fabbing extra cores to increase yields? I assume they're on an older process anyway. I don't necessarily feel Raspberry Pis are low quality – they're low spec, but I believe the ones I've had in the past seemed good, although I guess there's less stuff to be low quality (vs Steam Decks having a large amount of not-great plastic, control surfaces that fail in very noticeable ways, etc).

Raspberry Pi’s original SoC is designed by Broadcom for the set-top box market. Subsequent SoCs up until Pi 4 are of the same architecture design but with the Arm cores swapped out and upgraded.

https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/563

I believe the story was (at one point at least) that RPi used a Broadcom SoC that had already been developed for some other application, keeping the cost down by using a chip that was already in volume production. I don't believe this is still the case but then again I haven't been following RPi development very closely.

I don't think it indicates any use of inferior materials or build quality per se, just that they designed around existing components to avoid the high initial cost of a bespoke SoC.

Like Valve, they initially repurposed an old SoC that was designed for something else, either set-top boxes or phones, don't remember which. After their success they started doing custom work on the follow-up SoCs.

Yes, the lead of the Raspberry Pi foundation used to work at Broadcom and used a pretty old design that was meant for set top boxes because Broadcom sold it for little money.

Note these chips weren't fabbed with extra cores to increase yields

Nevermind what Nintendo has been getting up to since 1989...

I’ve had the OG Steam Deck and now have the OLED.

Genuinely curious, what do you consider low build quality on them?

Not OP, but the buttons are a bit mushy, the shell a bit creaky and, worst of all, the the Steam and Quick Access buttons feel terrible. It's all much more apparent when I pick up my Switch Lite, which itself isn't something I'd consider high build quality. That said, I'm ok with the compromises considering the price point.

Am OP, and yeah this is pretty much it. For me it's the fact that it's a huge chunk of not-great-quality plastic, when all my other devices are aluminium or better plastic. I'm lucky to have had no issues with the inputs, but they are known for having problems.

I'm also absolutely fine with these trade-offs for the price point, and in fact if pushed, I'd probably rather have a £400 device like this compared to a £500+ device with the same spec made of aluminium with slightly better inputs.

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