When I purchased the Steam Deck just a few years in the past, I was skeptical. I used to be prepared to threat shopping for solely the most affordable model doable—a $400 handheld with a measly 64 GB of storage. Now, I do know I adore it. I’ve used it for tons of of hours already, caught with restricted, slower storage. If I had been to rectify this error, I’d have to purchase an entire new console. Or at the least, that is what different devices have educated me to imagine. Not this time.

I’ve a protracted historical past of upgrading my gadgets myself, after I can. The desktop PC I take advantage of each day has been ship-of-Theseus’d from the same computer I built over 20 years in the past—by no means totally changed, however upgraded, piece by piece, through the years. During that point, it is more and more turn out to be the exception to the rule. Until the Steam Deck got here alongside.

Elusive Upgrades

I used to switch the battery in my early smartphones once they obtained outdated, respiratory new life into dated {hardware}. Now, few telephones enable this with out cracking open the entire thing. My first MacBook had house on the underside to improve its RAM. Now it’s baked right into the M-series processors. I wouldn’t be capable of improve it, even if it weren’t difficult to access.

Which is possibly why I felt so comfortable to be taught that my Steam Deck is, in reality, extremely straightforward to improve. Resources like iFixit, which advocate for a person’s proper to restore their very own gadgets, have guides that present how one can do particular upgrades on totally different devices.

The information for upgrading the Steam Deck’s storage is refreshingly simple. Unscrew and take away the again panel, take away the board defend, come out a cable, and unscrew the outdated storage.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 as an alternative and reverse the method. Done. 

It’s not fairly as straightforward as changing the battery in your TV’s distant, nevertheless it was sooner so as to add extra storage than it was to reinstall Steam OS. All informed, the method took possibly an hour. Instead of paying $130 further for a distinct Steam Deck—or worse, shopping for an entire new one for $530—I paid $20 for a cheap 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.

Repair on the Horizon

It additionally won’t be, for for much longer. Earlier this yr, the European Union voted to cross new rules that may require smartphones to come back outfitted with user-replaceable batteries. Currently, making an attempt to replace a battery on a recent iPhone requires specialty instruments and technical know-how, and may nonetheless lead to warnings that you just’re not utilizing “genuine” elements, even when utilizing official Apple batteries.

By 2027, that sort of barrier to changing a battery received’t be authorized within the EU, although the knock-on impact will possible result in producers complying globally. We already noticed a similar effect occur when the EU passed a law 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 all over the place.