> Hmm the article isn't about the interface being novel but the drives. The article claims the SD express cards top out a 900 MB/s but this drive does 3700 MB/s. They are using their own interface, but that's not the problem being solved here from my reading of this article.

It's a really weak claim when you frame it properly. If you have a good controller you can use either form factor just fine, at PCIe gen 4 x2 speed.

> maximizing their SD Express slots [...] Now that lights a fire under a lot of people and Biwin can start licensing the technology or selling directly to the Western market.

That would be nice!

The article is full of shit. SD Express cards, by virtue of being PCI-E x1 or x2, top out at whichever gen of PCI-E they implement.

Lets say its a brand new 4.0 card that implements x2 lanes, that is 3.93GB/s maximum speed (there aren't any 5.0 cards yet, afaik, but double that for 5.0).

Want to know where that 900MB/s figure came from? A 3.0 x1 card is 984MB/s. That is the first gen SD Express cards when the spec was launched, but not the currently available ones.

In other words, this is a PR release, this isn't news. It's marketing. They chose the worst case of their competitors, the best case of their own, and lied by omission.

Also, re: Valve's position on M2: they didn't support even swapping them when it first came out, although obviously allowed and expected, because you can put M2s in the device that are outside of the thermal parameters allowed by the design due to proximity to the battery and other heat producing items. This is also why they specifically used a 2230, as those are usually the lower power models meant for ultrathin laptops.

That said, Valve has worked with a few companies to get some officially blessed 2230s that actually do fit the intended use case and are also performant.

Like, if you think the Steam Deck sucks for actually doing the swap job, a) the new OLED replacement internally is a lot saner, with both construction and PCB layout, b) go try dealing with the really nasty designed laptops that don't have an externally accessible panel covering the drive bay; they're worse.

I'm sorry I dont care how hard valve tried. They still failed. To the consumer, the sd card limitation on the Deck is consumer hostile. 100 MB/s is inexcusable for a device being sold today and one expected to run Unity and Unreal 4 games that clock in at the tens of gigabytes. They should have made it more open and allowed easy access to M2 slots. Instead they used storage cynically to sell higher tier products.

The entry level deck is $399 but the 1TB one is $649. Almost $800 with tax and shipping for something that can't even play Unreal 5 games and has no proper expansion is inexcusable, not to mention the bizarre and shortsighted decision to have only one USB-C port on the device, and being locked onto the 15-watt mode of the chipset.

Some of that cost is the OLED update but frankly its deceptive and dishonest customer hostile pricing. The storage limitations are intentional to sell the higher tier Deck. Gabe didn't get 5 super yachts by being a "good guy." He's just maximizing his profit. There are no "good guys" in capitalism, instead its purely transactional and game theory dictated from top to bottom.

I do find it a little depressing that Chinese and Japanese companies are eating US companies lunches because they somehow are more open, more pro-consumer, and more affordable the US offerings. When in the past the US products were the more open and hackable ones and the imports were the proprietary and locked down customer-hostile messes. Not just this but a lot of electronics now. The hackable, learnable, fun, etc ones are foreign while the US domestic ones are overly 'not repairable' and 'not hackable' and by design to maximize profit. What a shame. How far we've fallen.

You bought a first gen product by a company that has never had an actual hardware design division, and you're complaining that it isn't perfect?

Also, how is the SD Card limitation on the Deck consumer hostile? The Steam Deck is an AMD platform PC. PCs typically do not even have SD card slots, and when they do, they are generic controllers plugged into the USB port.

To do SD Express, it requires a more expensive controller that can do PCI-E lane passthrough, and then you have to route those lanes somewhere and do it correctly. I am not aware of any laptop that opted to include an SD Express controller, and all of the Steam Deck competitors do not either.

The Steam Deck is advertised to implement a standard UHS-I card reader, and uses a better one that actually does do the full 104MB/s instead of the more frequently supported 52MB/s. UHS-I is common for 4k60fps cameras, such as Canon or Nikon bodies, or the GoPro, extremely few devices support UHS-II.

Like, I understand what you're trying to say, but nothing of that generation implements it, and the AMD SoC Valve uses afaik does not have the spare external PCI-E lanes to actually implement it anyways.

> You bought a first gen product by a company that has never had an actual hardware design division

They've released hardware before.

Yes, but nothing like this. I had a Steam Link, for example, its really a verbatim copy of the dev kit of the ARM SoC they used. Fun fact, same SoC as the Chromecast 1, and the SoC is cursed.

The controller was kinda cool, I didn't get one with mine, but making a controller is an entirely different set of skills than making a computer.

Vale has release several hardware products, many successful as well as being the brains behind the Vive.

Its not like Apple or other popular companies are any better in this regard.

The Vive hardware platform was built and designed by HTC for Valve, and the software platform was all Valve. It's more like Google's relationship with partners under the Nexus program, but unlike Google's Pixel line.

And yes, Apple design is kind of shit, but in a consumer hostile sort of way, not in an incompetence kind of way.