Consumer demand is much more price-sensitive than enterprise demand, not least because the latter can issue bonds to pay for RAM and GPUs. Prices for consumers are going up everywhere: food, gas, insurance, you name it.

Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch have a competitor that's the elephant in the room: Chinese Android handhelds that run rings around them on price and play everything from NES to Switch games locally as well as PS5/Steam via remote link.

Funny coincidence you mention it, I am an owner of one of those Chinese handhelds.

I owned an original Steam Deck and as soon as the OLED model was announced I decided to sell my model with the intention of re-buying the OLED one. Instead, I ended up with an AYN Odin 2, which I then sold in favor of the Odin 2 Portal when that arrived...which ended up feeling like the ideal device for the kinds of games I want to play.

The Steam Deck was a tad too bulky for my liking all along, but the 800p screen leaves a lot to be desired especially without the size increase of the OLED model.

The Odin 2 Portal has a wildly bright OLED screen that's big enough for streamed AAA games. Outside of things like airplanes and car rides, the streaming experience is surprisingly good and I can do it over a Wireguard VPN. It's also way better for battery life: the thing can go pretty much all day streaming.

The Chinese handhelds have been really impressive with how they've kept prices down. I really don't know how AYN delivers a handheld with 8GB of RAM for $260, or with the Qualcomm 8Gen2 for $330.00. And they’re the premium priced vendor.

Apps like Game Native are starting to be really exciting. It's wild that we are able to install and play PC games on an Android handheld.