$3,000 Steam Deck Prototype Disassembled: Concept Featured Discrete GPU, Smaller Joysticks, and Circular Touchpads

Sure, here’s a more human-like version of the article:

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So, there’s this YouTube guy—Jon Bringus from Bringus Studios—who somehow got his mitts on an early version of the Steam Deck. Honestly, no clue how these people find stuff like this. Anyway, a Twitter user—well, I mean X because Twitter decided it wanted to be edgy—called SadlyItsDadley lent him this rare little gadget, which was apparently Sample number 34. Not sure if that number’s supposed to be lucky or what.

Jon goes all tech-surgeon and opens up the Deck on his channel. Kinda amusing, really, because he finds this random paper inside marked “POC2-34 Control 163.” Proof-of-concept, huh? Sounds fancy, but whatever. It’s like Valve’s way of saying, “We were just thinking out loud.”

Inside, all sorts of peculiar things were happening. Like, who knew those touchpads would turn into those sleek rectangles we see now? This prototype had bigger circles. Weird, right? Apparently, the joysticks are like half the size they should be—maybe they were scared of commitment back then. Plus, it seems the BIOS was showing off with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U and 8GB RAM. No idea if it ate anything for breakfast that day.

Jon even made a copy of the SSD—maybe overcautious, maybe smart, who knows. But guess what? He finds this old version of SteamOS on it, with these mystery accounts. Though, of course, the main one, ‘34,’ was a vault he couldn’t unlock. The OS was from September 2020, so this unit was like a retro time traveler from about a year and a half before the Deck we know burst onto the scene.

Oh, and here’s a plot twist: Valve shook up the handheld gaming world with the Steam Deck. Nintendo might’ve set the stage with the Switch, but Valve’s fan base was like, “Hey, we love playing PC games in awkward places.” So now everyone’s in on it—Asus, Lenovo, MSI. It’s like a hardware party where everyone wants in.

Anyway, if you want more of this kind of chaotic tech drama, you might want to check out Tom’s Hardware on Google News (don’t forget to hit that follow button like it’s gonna run away).

And that’s about it. At least, I think. What was I even talking about again? Ah, never mind.