this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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My lemming on the internet, the Steam Deck costs less than a third of the price and the most expensive variant is just around half lmao
(Although I think one aspect where that argument for best laptop has holes is the used market for slim x86 devices. Apple Silicon may have advantages in terms of battery life, but software compatibility is still rough AF if you're not an artist or in music production)
Software compatibility on the Mac is fine, unless you mean emulating Windows for gaming like the Steam Deck does so well. In that case, I've gotten Fallout 4 to work with Whisky, but that's not a huge accomplishment. I have an M2 Pro Mac mini from 2023 and Fallout 4 came out in 2015. It's not a great platform for gaming in any case. I play Blue Prince on it and that looks good. Stray, too. Those are newer games, but not particularly demanding. They look okay, but the framerate isn't good. Xbox (Series X) is a better platform for both.
I'm not discounting or disregarding the Deck, I just haven't got one so I cannot say what it can or can't do. I've only heard good things about it. I have a friend who may be trying to unload one, I just can't spare the cash right now and I'm not that interested in owning one. And I think he does have the most expensive version. And I think he's upgraded the SSD in it. So sure, it would be a good deal and he'd make a good deal for a friend, I just don't really have the room for it. Still, it is tempting.
Steam Deck (or any Linux device) does not emulate Windows for games. A translation layer is much different.
I'm aware, but I'm not fully educated on the difference between the two.
It's like alien dogs — the creature is not a dog per se, it's not a canine, but you call it a dog (as a writer) so the reader understands it serves the same role, socially. I think there are a lot of colloquial terms like "dog" that get reused in science fiction where it's not that thing, but it's like that thing and that's what people understand.
So you can explain why WINE is not an emulator (that's actually what WINE stands for) but at the end of the day, it's a program that lets you run programs designed for another machine or operating system. It accomplishes the same goal for the end user as an emulator, even if it does so a little differently. I guess it's like Boomers calling Xbox and PlayStation "Nintendo." They're technically wrong, but they just see video games and go with the name they know.
Emulators have far more performance overhead compared to a compatibility/translation layer that WINE tries to accomplish. There can even be performance improvements overall due to the lack of additional Windows overhead.
This makes it different from say, DOSBox or PCEmu, since a machine with the same hardware specifications that the software was initially designed to run on can work well, or even exceed expectations. Emulators usually require much more power than the original core system.