$3,000 Steam Deck Prototype Taken Apart: Early Models Featured Discrete GPU Support, Compact Joysticks, and Circular Touchpads

Alright, so I stumbled across this video where some YouTube guy cracked open an early Steam Deck prototype—I mean, who even gets their hands on this stuff, right? Anyway, this creator, Jon Bringus from Bringus Studios (fancy name, huh?), went ahead and, well, ripped apart this thing on camera. Apparently, some other dude, goes by SadlyItsDadley (catchy), lent it to him, claiming Jon was the perfect historian for this gadget. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

So, Jon grabs a screwdriver and does his thing. This device has a paper with “POC2-34 Control 163” written on it. Not sure why that matters but hey, it’s proof this was some kind of concept number 34. It’s kind of wild to see how far Valve’s come since they first decided, “Hey, what if we made our games portable?”

Oh, and the look of this thing? Definitely not what you’d expect. The touchpads were these huge circles—not really my style—and the joysticks were tiny. Don’t even get me started on the weird palm rest situation. It had an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U, 8GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, and an Intel Wi-Fi chip. Supposedly it supported discrete GPU, but no one checked that out for some reason.

Then Jon does this whole techy magic, copying the SSD to check what’s inside. Turns out, there was this early version of SteamOS with a couple of accounts. One was named ‘34’—shocker—but he couldn’t get in. Why name an account after a prototype number if you can’t even access it? Geniuses, I swear.

Here’s a fun tidbit—this SteamOS dated back to Sept 30, 2020. Over a year before the Deck was officially out. So, this thing? Like a blast from the past. And I mean, the Steam Deck’s like a big deal now, shaking up the handheld gaming scene. Yeah, Nintendo did the handheld thing first with the Switch, but it’s the Deck that got big wigs like Asus and Lenovo thinking PCs could be portable too.

Okay, I’m done rambling. If you’re a tech nut, you probably know where to find more news. Look up Tom’s Hardware or something; they usually have the scoop.