Valve has certainly taken their time on the last few hardware releases, but honestly they pretty well nailed the Index and they absolutely nailed the Steam Deck, so it would be both hard to imagine them throwing in the towell just now and also it's exciting to think about what might be next. That said, I think anyone too anxious to know the next thing from Valve is just torturing themselves. They have every reason to take their time and do it absolutely right, and no reason to jump to market with something that sounds cool but is any kind of change that could open them up to trouble. I would also say that Valve hasn't done a lot of stepwise upgrades on hardware after something releases.

Since Valve said there was no plans to do a console upgrade anytime soon, this is actually good news. With the Z1, Z2 probably dropping near CES2025, The Ally, AllyX, Legion Go, and everything in between, the OG Steam deck is going to become obsolete sooner then anyone wants to admit.

On a personal note, I hope Valve is looking at the new RDNA3.5/4 APUs and will enable TB support for eGPU on the Deck 2.0. Having these handhelds with a eGPU dock has been a huge game changer when coming from the Nintendo Switch.