Once I purchased the Steam Deck just a few years in the past, I used to be skeptical. I used to be keen to danger shopping for solely the most affordable model doable—a $400 handheld with a measly 64 GB of storage. Now, I do know I like it. I’ve used it for a whole bunch of hours already, caught with restricted, slower storage. If I have been to rectify this error, I might have to purchase an entire new console. Or a minimum of, that is what different devices have educated me to consider. Not this time.

I’ve an extended historical past of upgrading my units myself, after I can. The desktop PC I exploit each day has been ship-of-Theseus’d from the identical pc I constructed over 20 years in the past—by no means absolutely changed, however upgraded, piece by piece, over time. Throughout that point, it is more and more develop into the exception to the rule. Till the Steam Deck got here alongside.

Elusive Upgrades

I used to exchange the battery in my early smartphones after they obtained outdated, respiration new life into dated {hardware}. Now, few telephones permit this with out cracking open the entire thing. My first MacBook had house on the underside to improve its RAM. Now it’s baked proper into the M-series processors. I wouldn’t be capable to improve it, even when it weren’t troublesome to entry.

Which is perhaps why I felt so completely satisfied to be taught that my Steam Deck is, in reality, extremely simple to improve. Assets like iFixit, which advocate for a consumer’s proper to restore their very own units, have guides that present the best way to do particular upgrades on completely different devices.

The information for upgrading the Steam Deck’s storage is refreshingly easy. Unscrew and take away the again panel, take away the board defend, come out a cable, and unscrew the outdated storage. Put your new SSD instead and reverse the method. Performed. 

It’s not fairly as simple as changing the battery in your TV’s distant, but it surely was sooner so as to add extra storage than it was to reinstall Steam OS. All advised, the method took perhaps an hour. As an alternative of paying $130 further for a special Steam Deck—or worse, shopping for an entire new one for $530—I paid $20 for an affordable SSD on eBay. Minus the price of an honest hamburger and half the size of a typical video essay on YouTube later, I can now set up extra video games on my Steam Deck, in much less time and with shorter loading screens than I had earlier than. This doesn’t should be a novel expertise.

Restore on the Horizon

It additionally may not be, for for much longer. Earlier this yr, the European Union voted to move new laws that can require smartphones to come back geared up with user-replaceable batteries. Presently, making an attempt to exchange a battery on a current iPhone requires specialty instruments and technical know-how, and might nonetheless end in warnings that you simply’re not utilizing “real” elements, even when utilizing official Apple batteries.

By 2027, that sort of barrier to changing a battery gained’t be authorized within the EU, although the knock-on impact will seemingly result in producers complying globally. We already noticed an identical impact happen when the EU handed a regulation requiring all telephones, tablets, and cameras bought within the area to have a USB-C port. It’s simply extra environment friendly to make one mannequin that the corporate can promote in every single place.