Man its gotta be a tough time to launch a console that can be cost competitive.
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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I gotta say, business wise they are handling it well IMO, although who knows if it will work on yhe long run.
Due to high demand, Playnix Console will be sold in monthly batches and to offer you the best possible price, we adjust the cost of each batch based on the actual price of components (especially RAM) at the time of manufacturing. This means the price may vary from one batch to the next.
So far they've sold out the first three batches already, so either they're lowballing their production runs or demand is strong.
At this point selling PCs without ram & storage is starting to sound like a reasonable thing. Especially as they claim it's "upgradeable" as one of their major selling points and it uses standard DDR4 ram and NVME SSDs, so many people interested have spares from old builds collecting dust.
I know it is just a headline, and it is a good one. But I still want to slip in here to say that RetroDECK was actually released for Steam Deck a few weeks before EmuDeck.
I think I'm kind of fucked. I Am forever lost in the depths of Linux. I just read the headline and thought to myself "Who the fuck pays for a Linux terminal and what does it have to do with emulators?"
I could see donating to your favorite terminal emulator. cool-retro-term is, well, pretty cool.
... and what does it have to do with emulators? terminal emulator (wikipedia)
That was my Second thought too.
This is great, but a new dilemma for me. I've been waiting for Steam Machine because I really want the small size and easy moving between TV and desk, compared to normal PCs. (Performance could go either way, I'm plenty satisfied with HD but also do have a 4k TV to use)
But I'm not actually sure precisely HOW small I want my gaming box to be. It seems like this'd be just a bit too clunky for me compared to the cube, but if Valve time pushes SM into 2027 I might just cave in, it still seems more convenient than most desktops I saw.
Awesome, glad they're doing it.
The problem is the price and the timeframe. The next batch is available next May?
For that price, more than a year from now, you'll likely be able to assemble or purchase a small form factor PC and build it out with similar or better components for significantly cheaper.
Bad time to be doing this, the specs are lower than my tablet I dropped $800 on a few years ago.
Before anyone drops a console they need to wait for the RAM to stop being $500+ and a decent sized SSD costing more.
I even looked at sd cards to slap in the slot and move my media off the drive and those had also doubled in price over the time period they'd normally have halved the cost of a larger one.
Gtfo man, what tablet is this that is more powerful than everythinh with a 9060xt attached? But it is a bad time indeed and nevertheless I hope it succeeds
I'll disagree on the ssd part. I got a refurbished deck and have no issues with load times from the micro sd. But big yeah on the ram.
I get what you mean. When I played cyberpunk 2077 on my PC I noticed a huge performance benefit moving it from my spinning disk to my SSD. I think it's because it dynamically loads as you play. So driving a car fast down the road for example leads to a lot of distant objects loading very late.
But on my steam deck I play all kinds of other titles. Even play coop Elden ring and that runs fine but the load times definitely lack compared to my desktop 🤣.
So I think YMMV depending on the game. I've got a 512GB deck with a 1TB SD card, SD card works pretty all right.
The biggest issues I've had with sd cards has been the exFAT file system, not the card itself, the ext4 or btrfs drives are soooo much faster and cleaner to use than "compatible" exFAT formatting.
Might also have something to do with the size of files that need to be loaded on a less powerful device. Just conjecturing.
In my case for cyberpunk it was all on my desktop, SSD vs spinning disk. For my deck it was Elden ring and one other game which I can't remember. But typically most everything runs fine off the SD card.
I was looking for a 2TB 2230 and they have a few at around $200, then most are at or over $500. They're nuts right now.