In October 2021, Valve showed how to disassemble the Steam Deck, which is a relatively simple operation, but Valve also gave a warning: “You shouldn’t do this” for reasons including Screws are easily damaged or lost, and battery failure can burn down your house.
Now that the Steam Deck has started shipping, Valve reiterated its hope that everyone will not touch the contents of the machine. Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais said technical work “is best left to the professionals.”
Griffais: “At the end of the day, it’s a PC you own, so we’re very aware that people want to see what’s in there. But we recommend that if anything goes wrong, take it to a professional to fix it, or return it to Valve. ”
Griffais conceded that Steam Deck, as a tiny, Linux-based PC, rather than a traditional handheld gaming console, one might think of as a user-upgradeable device and want to open up the internals for tinkering, which users might be particularly inclined to do things.
“We recognized that there was a great desire for people to be able to upgrade their PCs, and we looked at this very seriously, but in the end, the goal of having the portability and a handheld form factor was inconsistent in many ways,” Griffais explained. ” So we did everything we could, and we made it as modular as possible given the portability goal, but it was definitely a big trade-off that we had to do.”
Steam Deck will be in very short supply for a period of time, and purchase pre-orders made now are still not expected to start shipping until sometime in the second half of 2022. Valve recently said that Steam Deck production will be “in the hundreds of thousands” by April.