Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: grigiWhat do you think is a good cadence for updates? 3 years? 4 years? more?
The 8 year cadence of the switch is too long as it has definitely been losing developer interest in the last two years as it's too weak to support on multiplatform releases anymore.

It's far too long, the Switch was low-powered even at release and it has missed a fair amount of games as it's just not strong enough.

For the Deck 2, my suggestion there about announcing it late 2026, would mean a release in 2027. Making it about 5 years between Deck and Deck 2 which for a PC platform seems pretty darn reasonable to me, considering the Deck struggles a lot with newer games right now.

Hmm, but the gamble Valve took was minimised with Deck 1. I'm sure I read that they had to reserve a minimum of 2 million chips for a custom design, and that they were thinking there's no way we'll sell that many.
Likely that's why the Deck OLED came out so soon after as they ran out of their initial order and it was a similar cost to do an updated node.

Now with Deck 2 they can push a little harder if they aim to sell, e.g. 10 million of em. So instead of tacking on last-gen CPU cores to a current gen GPU, they could get more modern things.

So I'm thinking that the first generation cadence would make sense to be a little shorter, as there are already games where the Deck struggles.

So would be happy if they announce the next version end of next year for 2026 release.

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What do you think is a good cadence for updates? 3 years? 4 years? more?
The 8 year cadence of the switch is too long as it has definitely been losing developer interest in the last two years as it's too weak to support on multiplatform releases anymore.

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The next version should in my opinion be:
* Very slightly smaller/lighter/thinner
* Another 30% battery life bump
* 6-8 cores (no need to go above 8) that's very power optimized.
* Stick to the Radeon iGPU platform (as they have lots of software for it) so probably an RDNA4 20CU setup
* Bump to 256-bit RAM (or 192bit + some kind of big cache)
* Reduce the power consumption of uncore significantly, so online idle power can be brought down to the 1W range.
* Screen can stay the same, maybe eDP with VFR.

Basically, incremental improvements in form factor, focus more on power efficiency and a wide-and-slow CPU/GPU with ample compute and bandwidth so it doesn't starve itself like e.g. Phoenix APU's do.

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Quoting: cameronboschFwpud also worked well on my unit. I did the recent BIOS update through the command-line with no issues.

So, the latest firmware fixed something noticeable for me.
The original firmware, if I plugged the laptop into my phone charger (a 20W usb-c thing), or the steam deck charger, it would just say the charger isn't powerful enough and not charge AT ALL.

Now, it charges happily from the phone charger.
Very happy about that.

Also received a firmware update for the fingerprint reader that fixes a local-access security flaw. Had to re-enroll my fingerprints to get it to work again.

I also recently got Cyberpunk2077 and playing it on an external 4k monitor. It basically never drops below 30fps, so feels very smooth, even though its consistently below 60fps. Regardless of that, the game is very enjoyable.

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An update for the UK people, the UK petition is live this week.

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Quoting: sarmad

Quoting: cameronboschFinally an option with an ANSI keyboard layout. Though it comes too late for me, as I already got a Framework Laptop 16...

How is the Framework laptop? Is the build quality good enough? I have a feeling that given it's customizable nature that it won't feel as sturdy as regular laptops.

Mine feels sturdy enough. Reviewers were complaining about flex, but it has less flex than my previous notebook (MSI).
What I like is that I already recieved firmware updates through fwupdmgr, and bugs reported to them end up at the right linux/mesa core developers to fix it.
Been a pretty solid experience for me.

Battery life isn't amazing, but I get 8+ hours on battery easily, which is good enough for me.
There is work ongoing re improving that as well. But the modular nature does get in the way there as well.

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Quoting: fabertawe

Quoting: PenglingHonestly, I don't understand what a person could possibly get out of connecting appliances to the internet... :huh:

Exactly my thoughts but it gets worse... we had a new boiler installed and only after the fact I became acutely aware of this problem. To program or alter the time clock for MY boiler in MY home I have to have an online registration with Bosch and allow the thermostat on MY wall in MY hallway to connect to Bosch's server online! Where's the furious emoji?

I have a few cheap IP cams from a few years ago that I use as security cams and record constantly to my server via RTSP. Trying to buy such cams now is near impossible as they all use an app and record to the cloud via subscription. No thanks.

Sorry for the "off topic", as regards Ross'(s?) issue, I'm all for the refund idea (Catkiller) or an outright ban on singleplayer online access required.

I spent some time to make the new house's boiler (which uses a Hive device) to be local only. At least that uses Zigbee and you can run it locally, albeit you can't adjust the schedule, but that's fine as I would rather then manage the schedule from HomeAssistant.

But it's a pain that I even need to do that to get it to work at all.

Re cameras, I've started using RTSP cameras that allow to integrate with a 3'rd party NVR, so the more expensive corporate things. On the cheaper end of that is Reolink/Dahua and my Reolink cameras are working great. But it's a pain that everyone is pushing for cloud-first these days.

!Grumpy-emoji!

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: PenglingMy thoughts are that when you buy, say, a kettle, that kettle is yours to keep. If someone from the company that made the kettle were to come into your house a few years after you buy it and take away the kettle that you bought and paid for, that would be illegal. It should be the same for video games. It's very simple, really.

But this does happen, with all these "smart" products. See news all the time about features removed, suddenly subscriptions needed to keep certain features going and so on. It's not just gaming it happens. Sadly.

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: PenglingMy thoughts are that when you buy, say, a kettle, that kettle is yours to keep. If someone from the company that made the kettle were to come into your house a few years after you buy it and take away the kettle that you bought and paid for, that would be illegal. It should be the same for video games. It's very simple, really.

But this does happen, with all these "smart" products. See news all the time about features removed, suddenly subscriptions needed to keep certain features going and so on. It's not just gaming it happens. Sadly.

Indeed, I have been making shopping decisions based on:
Oh it's smart, eh? Can I use all its capabilities without ever connecting to your services or creating an account?

On a different note, I see the UK petition hit it's maximum of 20 user limit, and now has to go through "approval". Sigh.

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I'm happy to say I've never bought a Nintento console, and also have never even played one of their games.

There was that big hoohaa about some N64 emulator that was too good for its time and Nintendo throwing lots of resources to find whomever was responsible for it existing. That didn't stop N64 emulation.

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I can totally see the Steam Deck being a fantastic tool for games developers.
It's affordable, powerful, and easy to deploy software to.
It has many input schemes you can try, is a nice portable size, etc...

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