I'm in largely the same boat, but with a Playstation 4 (and no current Playstation 5 plans until Sony releases a version that is both readily available and not ugly).

I have a Steam library full of games bought on sale that my Mac was never quite up to the task of running, and the prospect of having them all on a neat little handheld for less than the cost of a midrange iPad is awfully compelling.

Have you looked into the gaming NUCs? This thing is probably going to be difficult to get, but those things are competent and expandable in the future.

Exactly. But I fear that 1280x800 won’t look great upscaled on my 1440p.

That said for playing 2d or lighter indie games it will probably run fine at native 1440p... assuming with external display that you can use native res.

Can you explain what you mean? The output with the dock says up to 4K and 8k at different refresh rates.

As a mac user, I bought an used PC (haswell i7) + used gpu (rx580) for about $500 (last year before hw price crunch though), and it plays everything on 1440p.

I recommend checking out Geforce Now, it lets you play many games from your Steam library via cloud streaming.

Unfortunately my experience with Geforce Now was deeply deeply underwhelming when played from a current-gen maxed out Macbook Pro w/ a wired Gigabit connection and 1050Mbps/75Mbps Internet service. It was a horrible lag-fest and felt like the game I was playing was being rendered as a flip-book.

Coming from previously having a top-of-the-line ($6k+) gaming PC a decade ago that still does "okay" on most titles at 1080P to trying to game via GeForce Now from my Macbook was a shockingly bad experience. I'm very interested in the SteamDeck specifically because it allows me to use local hardware to run the game without requiring me to build another $6k+ gaming PC which I might get to use one day a month.

Why not build a Ncase M1 form factor gaming PC (or other mini-itx), download steam on Mac and PC, and use Steam’s local streaming to play on Mac while being powered by the PC?

Alternatively, gaming laptop. I’m missing the use case of the Steam Deck except in the event of a budget crunch, since you can get ultraportable 14” gaming laptops that have good oompf - examples being the Asus G14 and the Razer Blade 14.

Generally speaking, I'd just as soon build my $6k+ gaming desktop. I honestly probably would have already done so if it weren't for such severe parts availability issues and my refusal to give money to scalpers.

I'm in Brazil, and the latency is a deal breaker.