Ooh. Normally I stay away from refurbished hardware, but the Steam Deck has really good repairability reviews. The base OLED price is just a bit higher than what I would want to spend, so I'll really have to consider this.
What's your reason for not buying refurbished hardware? I personally always buy used / refurbished, so I'm interested in why you wouldn't.
Electronics have lifespans. With refurbished parts, it's hard to tell if you're buying something that someone else whoopsie-bought and sent right back, or waited until a day before the end of the return period before sending back. And that return period might be long if they had an extended warranty through the manufacturer.
I'm generally pretty comfortable diagnosing hardware failures and isolating components, but so many electronics are a massive headache to break down and service, you often have to toss them as soon as one crucial component fails. For those, I'd rather spend a bit more and improve my chances of getting the most lifespan out of the whole.
For the Steam Deck, if I didn't already have a good desktop PC and wanted to get into PC gaming, I would be happy to spend the full price on a new OLED. Just having it for travel and light usage around the house, I don't mind holding out for a better price breakdown.
And this is of course also assuming that the refurbishing process is on the up-and-up. That's not always the case
OLED keeps getting cheaper for the average person.
$350 for a new under-powered OLED Switch only to never have sales and be stuck with an os that has next to no features meanwhile you can spend $89.1 more on a used OLED Steam Deck and get a much more powerful experience with constant sales and much more freedom to do with the device as you please.
And possibly already have a vast library of games if you have a Steam account.
Even if you already had previous Nintendo consoles with games, they wouldn't carry over.
They use Arch btw.
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