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Yes I have heard of it... and yes I know its junk. Specially for running anything PC related because its only designed to run apple software and even then its not great at it.
The integrated GPU that the Deck has is not all that powerful, its enough to run many of the latest games at 720p, 30 to 60 FPS at decent settings.
Thats what its designed to do because thats what people want in a hand held. They want to be able to run their latest games at a decent quality. They actually want to run them at 1080p but at the size of the deck with what else it can do, thats just not happening right now.
Sure you could lower the specs, put in a crappier CPU with integrated GPU, but guess what, they will cost more money AND use more power. The APU that is in the deck is a very custom design from AMD. It is a very specific design with processing power and power usage in mind.
If you drop the specs so that it can't run stuff at 720p, people will not want it. Why? Because they see stuff like what Nintendo has with the switch and want that. But the games for the switch are specifically designed to run on the switch. They are designed to specifically run on that known hardware.
Games are steam are not designed to run on the Deck. They are not targeted to run on any specific hardware other then the kind of hardware that can run Windows or Linux. This means the Deck has to run software that is not optimized for it.
Because it has to run software that is not optimized for it, the hardware has to be more robust in general and will use more power which causes more heat which has to be cooled somehow.
Also if you haven't noticed, when you "game" on a phone or a tablet they can get quite hot. When they get too hot (which they can do quite fast) a few things happen. The phone/tablet slows down causing the FPS in the games to drop. Drop below a certainly amount and the game is unplayable. Also the phone/tablet can become too hot to hold. If the phone/tablet becomes too hot, it will crash/shutdown.
Same thing happens with the Deck and laptops and even desktops. If they run too hot, the quality of the gaming goes down.
So again they could make the deck waterproof (though the examples you have given are not actually water proof or even all that water resistant) but doing so would make it unable to run most of the software its targeted to run.
No actually you can't compare stuff like that just because the batteries are the same size. There are laptops with batteries just small enough to legally go on an aircraft, which are twice the size of what comes in a tablet, but they don't last as long because the laptop takes more power to run things that a tablet can't because its CPU is just not designed to run PC software.
You can't just run any software on any CPU/GPU. It has to be designed to run on that hardware. Or you need software that can translate it for the CPU/GPU to understand it. Problem with that, it usually requires even more resources to do that.
Its like if you are trying to talk to someone who doesn't speak your language. You need a translator. But using a translator takes longer and makes things more complicated.
The deck is designed to run general software at a certainly quality.
Laptops use more power because their hardware is vastly different from a Decks. They have a bigger monitor that runs at a much higher resolution and is designed to run higher more steady FPS. Laptops are usually designed to run at least 1080p at 60FPS today. But there are some that run up to 4k (pointless for a small screen) or some of them are designed to run 144FPS or even up to 240 FPS for some reason. All that takes much more processing power, not just for the GPU but also for the CPU. And that also requires more battery usage.
Most laptops are pretty wide open to help with cooling. But when most laptops get going you don't actually want them on your lap, they would be too hot. In fact you shouldn't even have them just sitting on a flat surface you should have it elevated a little off the surface because they need as much air movement as possible.
Same goes for the deck, it needs as much air movement as possible.
So again if you want it water proof or even just water resistant, something even the switch isn't which would be a slightly more comparable machine, you would need to drop the specs to make it run cooler, meaning you wouldn't be able to run most of the stuff you can run now with it, meaning far less people would be interested in it, meaning Valve has less of a reason to sell it in the first place.
Remember, we already see people complaining about it not being able to run games at 1080p 60 at full quality.
OR
You need to make it so large that it includes all the needed heat pipes to move the heat outside of the enclosed internals along with having water proof/resistant fans on the outside that it makes it much bigger than it is, and has exposed hot pipes which can make it so that parents don't want their kids using it in case they get burned which would be a legal nightmare for Valve.
You would not be able to have it just transfer the heat to an external casing because then it becomes too hot to hold and people won't be interested in using it, meaning less people will want it, meaning Valve has less of a reason to sell it.
Remember we always see some people complaining its too big already. They want it to be able to do what the switch can do.
They are already not making a whole lot from each one sold. If it wasn't selling as well as it is, well they would have no reason to keep making it or supporting it.
Something else you have to take into consideration is that Valve designed it to have a bunch of user replaceable parts. Something you just can't to on tablets or phones or even many laptops, though certain things like batteries being glued in are dumb, the rest of the stuff is just so small and delicate that most users wouldn't be able to replace them on their own anyway.
The moment you open up something thats water resistant/proof you usually lose that. I had a really nice water proof watch, once it was opened up to replace the battery, it was never the same and that was done by someone trained to work on watches.
Dunno I have these things called EYES. And even my utterly blind -8.5 diopter vision can tell when you know RAIN is coming. Even in Singapore where it literally does a die roll ever hour of "when will ti rain more than you have ever seen in your entire life" you can still tell when its going to rain when its actually coming.
And again Nintendo has never, ever made a water resistant handheld. Ever. Sony has never made one. NeoGeo never made one. Atari never made one.
You're acting like this is some kind of regression when LITERALLY NO ONE has ever made a water resistant portable gaming device.
Like its only been 2 years, have you forgotten how an Intel based Mac sounded like a jet engine when the fans kicked in? You DO REMEMBER Apple used to make Intel based laptops right? Remember those? Remember when they had AMD or Nvidia GPUs in them?
Its sort of hilarious you would bring up the M1/M2 and yet literally ignore the decade of Intel based Apple laptops is somewhat astounding.....
But ok lets say wee magically ignore the whole Intel Mac thing that was apparently not a thing for the past 17 years
So the M1 Air, which is a passively cooled device.
Guess what happens after about 15 minutes of gaming on that thing
It throttles the entire laptop to prevent it from overheating
So yeah sure if you enjoy playing at 60fps for a few minutes on an M1 mac before you FPS magically starts dropping to 30fps due to thermal throttling, yeah sure lets passively cool the 'definitely not RISC' based CPU and watch it thermally throttle itself to 1GHZ to prevent the entire CPU from turning into molten silicon
Tablets are basically all screen and little components, they are meant to operate in a very low power state and have a limited amount of battery when actually put under load. You wouldn't walk around in rain with electronics directly exposed as things are generally only resistant, not proofed against rain. Though certain components are usually directly exposed and can cause damage with a high repair bill.
They're entirely different.
One has issues playing mobile games with battery power, and the other is meant to play real video games at 30-60 FPS. One is meant for absolute basic functionality and has issues with basic browsing, the other can do everything limited to the hardware itself; seeing as the Deck is made to play games, it has little to no issues outside of battery span.
If you were to seal the Deck, make it completely airtight, how do you think it would perform and what temperatures do you believe it could sustain? What do you think would happen if you disabled the fan?
Ever seen what happens when a vehicle engine can't get cooled? Because that needs to be cooled, and something like a little electric scooter would be less likely to need cooling in comparison. You need to better understand what is fine with purely passive cooling, and something that needs active cooling. Even I need to cool tablets if I put them under stress.
That's not how things work.
Yeah ummm thats not how watercooling works at all.....
I take baths a lot and find myself basically daily (when I’m actively using it, at least) wishing my steam deck was waterproof enough to take in it without worry.
Like you, I’m also a strategy game type gamer, and when I’m not doing that I’m usually playing some game that’s like a decade+ old lol. How graphically demanding my games are that, if my phone had a great controller layout like the steam deck, I could use my phone in the bath to game basically without trouble (once I migrated to Linux or something lol, screen size aside for most titles)
Computer components have gotten even better since you posted this, and every year that goes by will make your case for a water proof steam deck stronger, even if limited to a “deck light/mini” like others mentioned in this thread.
The fact that handhelds and consoles up to this point aren’t made water proof is not reason enough alone to say that it’s “stupid” or “unreasonable and unrealistic” for a device of this type to do so.
The arguments in this thread read like one that would be had in a phone-related forums in the early 2000s. “How can you expect them to make a device with a [numpad/keyboard] in it water proof? Obviously if you need to use your phone when it’s raining, just go inside and call, can’t you use your eyes and see when it’ll rain? What are you even thinking, wanting to use it [in/near body of water]?” This argument is absolutely ridiculous today with the advent of touch screens and emphasis on an internal seal.
While I understand that the above argument is weak in quite a few regards (particularly in relation to the vast number of water intrusion points the steam deck has at the moment, and the infeasibility of making the device touchscreen only; an emphasis on internal seal is also not feasible for a repairable focused device (opening up a device will inevitably weaken a seal unless care is specifically made to avoid that)), it remains true that the deck’s form factor is not strictly intertwined with being impossible to waterproof. It absolutely can be engineered around.
The steam deck basically initiated a large wave of copy cat devices for its form factor and general performance (“able to play ‘AAA’ games), so obviously valve has a strong influence in this space. With both this device and the VR index, valve has obviously shown themselves as readily distinguishing themselves from the crowd via impressive engineering; to do so again is readily imaginable without a narrow and/or stubborn mindset.
I hope we will be vindicated in the future, be it 5 or 25 years from now!