At this point in time, with how expensive the Ayn Thor has gotten and the downgrade from UFS 4.0 to 3.1 (WITH a simultaneous price increase), that console dead to me personally, unless prices return to normal (which won’t happen).
However, the future of portable gaming is absolutely in ARM based consoles. Given that the upcoming Steam Frame will come with ARM to x86 translation (FEX), I think that Valve is also aware of this, and that the Steam Frame is the tip of the iceberg and will act as a sort of testing ground for ARM.
I’m hoping that Valve creates a variant of the Steam Deck that runs on an ARM-based chip, in addition to a true Steam Deck successor console running on a normal AMD processor and GPU.
While I think Ayn is currently out of reach price wise, more competitors will begin to pop up making similar things (e.g. Retroid Pocket Flip 2).
detren@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Yeah the price increase on the AYN sucks, but I brought them up as examples of great devices that run PC emulation quite well in a very small form factor (at least compared to PC handhelds).
Also I 100% agree that ARM is the future here, and that Valve is probably testing the waters with Steam Frame. It all fits in just way too perfectly. That being said, while I would hope to be wrong, I could imagine them completely moving to ARM and just not release a true Steam Deck successor at some point based on x86. Valve is kinda making history with not making direct successors with the Valve Index -> Steam Frame.