

It’s a PC, essentially, so the hardware is always evolving, they could upgrade whenever they choose to. The advantage of any console, the Steam Deck included, is it offers a very consistent set of specs the developers can target for years. If Valve iterates too quickly, then two problems arise: One, there’s one performance goal for devs interested in making a portable game to work towards, there’s many. In addition, the Steam Deck Verified program gets a lot harder to maintain if there are too many flavors of Deck to manage. I think Valve is planing on a lifecycle similar to the major consoles.
The upside is it is all PC hardware, and there are other handheld manufacturers out there, some even running SteamOS, so if you want a higher performance rig before Valve’s ready for the SD2, you can certainly find what you’re looking for.

At the end of the Strange New Worlds musical episode, after the curse is broken, there’s a cover of the TOS theme that didn’t make it onto the album.