Steam Deck sells out in North America within 24 hours of price hike
arstechnica.comLooks like arsTechnica mastered the clickbait. The title is misleading, the first sentence contradicts it, the claim is false (there is stock), and even if it weren't it's irrelevant without knowing inventory size. I can think of 0 positive things going for this article.
No, they weren't wrong -- it was listed as sold out almost immediately after. It's just out of date now already since it looks like it has been restocked again. Source? I had checked shortly after they said they restocked only to see it was sold out again.
Also, they addressed the inventory size in the fine article. Maybe the snark isn't warranted?
I used a tracker to be notified of when it become in stock. It went in and out of stock several times that day.
I agree, the title and article say exactly what happened
No? The website has units available here[0] in the US. I think this article is old. There must have been a very small first shipment that got sold out before the next batch came in
the article was posted on 5/28, three days ago. both steam decks are showing as available for me too.
"Sold out" is mostly meaningless if we don't know the inventory they moved. Perhaps 5,000 units have rolled off the line over the last week and those all sold. Or maybe 200,000 sold out in one day. We simply don't know what it means to sell out.
My guess is they could sell low double digit thousands per month, in which case selling out temporarily in some regions is an entirely meaningless measure hardly worth an article or even a tweet.
It's not normal for things like this to sell out. Most businesses want to be able to fulfill the sale when the customer is already on their site ready to pay, not make them look elsewhere. Either they're having inventory problems, or they're testing pricing, or they're trying to build hype. It's interesting even though I don't care to own a Steam Deck.
It's quite normal because they do have inventory problems because component suppliers are stretched ridiculously thin. Apple, the master of one of the biggest tech hardware supply chains in the world, couldn't get Sony to step up beyond 1M display panels in year one of Vision Pro component production. Now with RAM being not just expensive, but hard to come by, those problems are exacerbated beyond the challenges of the niche display panels that have no market outside of these HMDs. When BOE, Sony Semi, Samsung and SeeYa have maxed their factory space making simple displays that sell at scale, they're not in a hurry to devote precious production lines to niche panels with terrible yields.
No-one knows how many they had in stock. It might have been 6.
> Note: Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.
Misleading article
Was curious about the price hike. 512GB OLED model was $549 and is now $789.
It is a little underpowered though compared to modern processors.
Software is more important than hardware.
Isn't the whole point of this thing the hardware? Cause it runs free software, but you can't find many pocket PCs. But yeah the specs don't matter so much.
TL;DR: Scalpers doing scalper things.
Yeah, but the fact scalpers can immediately turn around and easily sell it for 1k on eBay doesn't detract from the point.