Rant: Valve's new Steam Deck screws speak volumes about their ethos.
Rant: Valve's new Steam Deck screws speak volumes about their ethos.
In case you're out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads.
Valve absolutely did not have to change their screws, and its probably actually against their best interests. While other companies around the world are constantly in search of new ways to screw their own consumers, Valve goes out of their way to update their screws to make them easier to install/remove by changing to torx screws and added metal threads in the backplate. Those who know anything about mechanical engineering know this is not an insignificant amount of effort they put into it.
This is a small change that makes a huge impact, and speaks volumes about the ethos of the company. It says:
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We want to make our devices last longer, and be easier to repair.
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If you want to buy the cheaper tier and save yourself a few bucks by installing whatever SSD you want, go right ahead.
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We trust you to make decisions for yourself.
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Most importantly, we respect you, the consumer, and want you to fully own and control the devices we sell.
Valve is by no means perfect, and there's plenty more they could be doing, but they've earned my respect and my patronage and I won't buy games from anywhere else. I will buy whatever future products they sell, even if I don't think I'll use them regularly.
Less of a rant, more of a rave.
Cool upgrade for hobbiests.
Ya from the title I expected OP to be complaining because they don't own a torx head screwdriver/bit.
Was expecting the same and I didn't even know they switched to torx. Philips screws are bad. I go out of my way and spend extra money to avoid them.
When Gaben dies there will be fucking riots.
I really hope he's cultivating at least one successor within the company to carry on his vision.
Valve is possibly the closest thing to a non-evil company in the world today.
One of the benefits of not going public, I guess
But it only works as long as the replacement for Gabe Newell has the exact same ethos about the business. Changing hands always risks changing how things function at a company. Unless Newell has been practically grooming a successor for years, it's very likely that a replacement will want to "shake things up."
When Newell retires/passes, things will change. Time will tell if it will be for the better or the worse.
Private companies owned by institutional investors are no better.
The real difference is the the founder still own the company.
I love their approach to Hardware and Linux but have we collectively forgotten that Valve had a huge part in pushing loot boxes and underage gambling? Far from being the least evil company, but still a net win for consumers and I appreciate that they exist.
And you wanna know why? :)
divulgâche
It's because they're not public. So investors can't ruin everything like they always do.
More specifically “private equity” investors who are gradually looting the US economy.
While other companies around the world are constantly in search of new ways to screw their own consumers
You bastard, take that upvote.
I read the title with that connotation. Was actually looking forward to hearing a valid complaint of the steam deck but Surprise!
I can already hear my business administration professor scream that everyone in the free market tries to screw each other from that statement lol. Why yes of course, money. Planned obsolescence is the only logical choice, people! I bet nobody will source old, but durable products and repair them instead, no no. That'll never happen!
Yeah what Valve is doing is great. Hopefully they will become more mainstream in the future and become more known with the super casual crowd. Nintendo definitely needs more proper competition in the handheld market.
Also FYI it’s Phillips with double L, Philips with one L is the Dutch electronics company.
I actually thought they invented those screws, thus linking them to their company. Glad to be enlightened
If they do become more mainstream, there is more opportunities for enshitification.
Nah not as long as they don’t go public and Gaben runs the company
As someone who used to run a louis rossman electronics repair business for a couple years before i burned out.
LG G5 was and still is my point to for perfectly fixable devices.
Motorola is trash because you have to dismantle the phone from the back layer by layer just to reach the front screen.
HTC was even worse with two tier motherboards and octopuss ribbon cables were a nightmare to navigate.
iPhone was/ is possibly the easiest fucking phone to fix, ironically...however by the iphone 8 and onwards apple found increasingly shitty ways to make 3rd party repairs nearly impossible.
windows phones, nokia, and others were hit or miss. tablets were long winded affairs but generally easy due to their inherent size.
ive been out of the game since 2019 when covid dropped. id really like to hear the inside baseball on any current operators running repair business.
i used Repair Shopr software to manage my customers. idk if thats still the go to or if another has bested it.
When I couldn't repair my Nokia and replace the 5 € USB-Port because there happened to be a small crack in the screen (of course you have to remove the glued on screen to accese the innards), I caved and bought a Fairphone 3.
Worst decision ever. The stupid thing refuses to break to let me even use the better repairability.
Any opinions on Samsung or Google?
samsung was alright. You could order a new LCD with the frame and just put the old guts in. but the cost of the screens were exceptionally high, especially for their rugged series of devices. so high cost for ez repairs. its a trade off most found acceptable.
and ill be honest. anyone smart enough to buy a google pixel. never came into my shop. i bought a few 1 and 2s from customers who were changing devices but i don't think i saw one pixel phone land on my repair table.
Just in case you were wondering, Motorola is still trash. I bought the G5 and I absolutely hate it.
I wonder if the decision has anything to do with selling refurbished units. It’s a good change, glad to see this!
Almost definitely. When they did the initial release, it could have easily been a flop, and if it was a flop, it would have been pointless to have gone in planning to repair and sell refurbished units. Now that sales are showing its a hit, they are taking the time to invest in changes for more long-term support.
Self-tapping screws made sense for a product in an entirely new product category without knowledge if it would be successful or not. Torx screws that slide into metal threads makes a lot more sense for what is expected to be a product with long shelf-life.
Yeah I haven't even made an account on Epic to get free games from there. Valve almost single handedly made Linux a viable gaming platform and I'm grateful for that (I know wine has existed far longer than proton, but the difference before and after proton is day and night).
Even before Proton Valve was heavily invested in Linux gaming.
SteamOS has been around way longer than Proton, and the Steam Client had a native Linux version for such a long time, I don't even remember when it was published. Also, the Steam Linux Runtime is something worth mentioning - it is a common base that game developers can target instead of the various different distributions.
Torx screws and threaded inserts is not really that much effort engineering side.
It has more significant impact on the cost. Millions of torx screws and threaded inserts cost more than self tapping Phillips into plastic.
It’s almost like Valve doesn’t absolutely hate their customers.
Strange how a company with infinite money just produces stuff they like huh?
Every company should try that.
Look at the shit Apple produces and understand it is not only a function of money.
Steam is an infinite money generator, yes, but any publicly owned company would have fucked it up for short term profits. Valve absolutely has its problems, but its focus on the long term and respecting its customers means it can make infinite money and do stuff like this.
Yeah, the OG Steam Deck video before it even released made very clear that the original run was made with self-tapping screws, which meant that disassembly and re-assembly was always going to result in a less firm and tight re-assembly because the holes have already been tapped once.
It was honestly my personal biggest complaint considering it seemed otherwise like they were aiming to support self-repair. Very refreshing to see they changed tack to a costlier option for the sake of their customers. Very true, companies rarely do this out of the goodness of their hearts, and Valve is an unusual company.
I think Valve in on very early steps of enshittification. Maybe not everyone, but most companies started like that. I mean being nice to users. Counterargument to my claim is that they are already millionaires, which is true, but humans' greed may be limitless.
I think a reason that Valve has been able to be consumer friendly for so long is that they aren't public and not beholden to shareholders.
To be clear, that gives them the opportunity to avoid enshittification. There's plenty of private companies that are dogshit. Valve happens to be one of them that took the opportunity and ran with it.
When Gaben retires or dies, things could very easily change. But I don't think it'll happen before then.
This is the correct answer.
When a company only has to please customers they are allowed to bend and in extreme cases break their own rules for a customer to be satisfied.
When you have to please share holders and customers. You as a laborer must decide to please the customer or the share holders. Sadly the longer you work somewhere the more like you are to please a customer if you work with them directly. The further you are from the customer the more likely you are to disagree with choosing customer satisfaction over shareholder satisfaction. Begin enshitirication.
Valve being a private company is probably the thing that allows them to focus on putting out good products w/o dealing with shareholders demanding more.
And they make a ton of money doing right by their core consumer base, I would be very surprised if we see any of that change.
If Valve were any other company they would have laid off half their staff and coasted on that 30% from Steam. They're not perfect, but maybe the only company I feel good about giving money to, consistently.
If valve were public, and required to make a lot more money than the previous quarter, they would absolutely need (want?) to get the maximum amount of money from wherever they could. It's what I think it's happening with netflix & others. It doesn't matter that (hypotetically) they make a billion dolars of revenue. They need to make more next quarter. So they need to raise prices, forbid account sharing, reduce content quarity, anything to earn as much money as possible for next quarter.
Volvo could earn a billion dollars, and if they don't want to earn more, they could happily stay the same. They might even want to make moves thinking on the long term, such as keep customers happy and excited, or invest in new technologies like proton. Compared to netflix execs, who don't care about the long term, they care about next quarter.
I don't know a lot about the stock market, but it looks stupid to me to bet on infinite growth. If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn't I earn money via dividends? It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?
If the company earns money, and I own shares, shouldn't I earn money via dividends?
You do. Companies give dividends all the time (well, every x months, usually at least yearly).
It looks to me like the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high? Or is that just greed?
Just greed... mostly. A lot of people want to "get rich quick", and a bunch of already rich people like to gamble to get even richer, so a lot of market volatility comes from greed... but a share price with good growth expectations can make it attractive enough that the company may decide to give lower dividends (no need to attract people), so if you can "buy low, sell high", you may still want to do it regardless.
You can still ride the market mostly on dividends by diversifying and investing into multiple companies whose share prices will average out in the long run (picking the right diversified portfolio, is an art on itself).
need to make more next quarter
That's mostly an effect of tying C-suite compensations too closely to share prices, with no further checks in place. When the main driving force behind the decision makers is increasing share prices, they'll happily burn down the whole company, cash out, and jump ship.
Sometimes it's done on purpose, when some long-time investors grow tired and decide to cash out, maybe because they expect a change in the market and the company becoming less competitive or even obsolete. If the expected changes are big enough, it's easier to start a new company from scratch, than to restructure an old behemoth with thousands of people used to doing things "like they've always been done".
The fact that you said Volvo on accident brings me back to the old ThioJoe troll days
I don't think it will happen. Enshittification has a predictable life cycle. Valve has had years of opportunity to sell out, but haven't.
I just don't use my impact drill on them and I've never had an issue.
The fact that it's usually fine is probably why they didn't feel like they had to do this to start.
The failure rate probably isn't that high, but it's extra wear over time that can be prevented.
But how do you know if the screws are tight when you're not counting ugga duggas?
You're clearly doing it wrong then. You need to torque those screws more than you do your lugnuts
I just sonic welded my steam deck, with extra rivets through the screen and fan to be sure.
Made by hardware hackers for hardware hackers.
Turns out i'm gonna buy a steamdeck with them using linux and thinking of things like this.
I just need to wait a bit as the most expensive season is around the corner, i'm just glad our Dutch black friday doesn't outdo any regular discount making it a near necessity to wait for black friday.
Are people continually opening their steam decks? I am confused at the opportunity to have stripped screws and dethreaded holes.
You just need to open it once to strip a screw
People ITT: it's called ranting and raving!
Three thoughts:
- Valve doesn’t use physical media, so there isn’t a need to enforce DRM at the hardware level
- the Deck itself is sold at a small profit regardless of the configuration, so there’s no benefit to pushing users to higher-price configurations
- Valve enforces its DRM in software via the OS
The biggest reasons to lock down hardware aren’t really there on the Deck. On top of that, it benefits Valve to have other devices running their storefront, so using off-the-shelf parts when possible makes it easier for others to use the Deck as a template.
Why Robertson heads are only popular in Canada I'll never understand.
Y'all missing out.
I mean, you got my upvote already, but one big reason is that Robertson wanted to control all the manufacturing of the screws and the bits. Phillips licensed his patent out and let anyone make them just taking a tiny licensing fee. Made a fortune on volume. Robertson: good engineer, bad businessman.
Because hexagonal screw drives are superior, they can transfer more torque and last longer. What I don´t get is why slotted, cruciform and square screw drives are even still around when there are much more reliable alternatives to choose from, like Hex and Torx for example.
Didn't they change to torx and change the base they screw into metal?
The former is a mild annoyance, but they're a pretty standard bit now that anyone that does any electronic DIY has in their set. The latter is a huge improvement.
Must admit I didn't look too much into it though
but mostly seems positive.I saw rant and got raved
Got me in the first word, not gonna lie.
