A Google search preview from the official Barcelona Asus store “Asus by MacMan” has accidentally revealed what many feared: the ROG Xbox Ally X will retail for €899, while the standard model sits at €599.

Not sure how this would translate to USD 1000 to be honest. Prices in euro usually include taxes, which is what, 21% in Spain? So minus taxes the 599,-€ model would translate to about $550 (taxes not included).

This still doesn’t undercut the Steam Deck which I feel it should do considering it’s likely using the same APU and the Deck is a couple years old at this point, but it’s not as bad as the headline/article makes it sound.

I don’t think Europe has competitive SoCs.

What’s “Apple Plan”?

Tumbleweed. Rolling release with automated testing (openQA), snapper properly setup out of the box.

Honestly the entire openSUSE ecosystem. Tumbleweed on my main PC that often has some of the latest hardware, Slowroll on my (Framework) laptop because it’s rolling but slower (monthly feature updates, only fixes in-between), and Leap for servers where stability (as in version/compatibility stability, not “it doesn’t crash” stability) is appreciated.

openSUSE also comes in atomic flavors for those interested. And it’s European should you care.

With all that being said, I don’t really care much about what distro I’m using. What I do with it could be replicated with pretty much any distro. For me it’s mostly just a means to an end.

There isn’t official pricing nor reliable sources out there so I’m going by rumors.

With your calculation you have to keep in mind that the Switch 2 cards have to somewhat match microSD Express speeds, so a more accurate comparison would be these, but they aren’t available in 64 GB sizes.

All I’ve heard is that they’re expensive and with the larger sizes often required for Switch 2 games it’s an even bigger problem than with Switch (1). These key cards exist for a reason. And I’d bet Nintendo takes a margin on these instead of only requiring the publisher to cover the manufacturing costs.

Cyberpunk is on a 64 GB card that holds the entire game.

My point is that Nintendo does play a big factor in the price choice.

For someone owning both devices and actually trying to decide which version to get, both are decent in portable mode with the Switch 2 taking the lead in docked mode (as the Deck doesn’t increase its power limits in docked mode whatsoever). So I’d probably get the Switch 2 version if I didn’t have a desktop PC to go with my Deck, but I do, so my “docked” experience (playing on my PC) is vastly superior anyway, with the Deck getting the portable part done.

For a technical comparison it’s kind of inaccurate I think. Yes, it’s certainly impressive that the Switch 2 can run this game in portable mode likely consuming less than 10 watts for the entire system while producing okay graphics. And it’s clear that DLSS does a lot of heavy lifting here, but:

• The 8.9 watts figure is likely somewhat inaccurate because it’s based on approximate battery life while playing the game. Even if the game is played from 100% to 0%, there’s still inaccuracies because the specific battery likely won’t have 19.3 Wh exactly. Instead it’ll likely be a bit higher than that when brand new, and a bit lower with 100s of cycles.
• The Switch 2 clearly consumes less power than the Deck needs to achieve “playable” framerates in Cyberpunk 2077, but that doesn’t tell us that much about the efficiency of just the SoC. I’d assume the Deck requires a little bit more juice for its OLED screen and also more for the rest of the system, for example the standard NVMe drive it uses. The “approximately 9 watts consumption” comparison they’re doing makes it look like the Switch 2 is around 3 times as efficient, but that’s not how efficiency curves work. You’re comparing the Deck at a power consumption level that’s probably the peak of Switch 2s efficiency curve.
• Game settings are (currently?) impossible to match. Some can be matched, others are either some in-between on Switch or even “lower than low”, for example some models/geometry. I assume these changes have a large enough performance impact that CDPR thought they were worth to implement just for the Switch 2.
• Scene-specific pixel counting wasn’t really done, so it’s not possible to say which device renders more “real” pixels (even though DLSS certainly seems to make the most out of these pixels).

I still think the Switch 2 is very impressive in terms of performance in portable mode, certainly more than I expected when hearing about the rumored Ampere architecture and the Samsung manufacturing process.

It also shows that something comparable to DLSS (likely FSR 4) would be hugely beneficial to PC handhelds so I hope that the Deck 2 will properly support that. Sad that AMDs Z2 series don’t, but I hope Valve is cooking another custom chip with AMD soon.

Well, at least for the physical edition, they have to account for the cost of the 64 GB game card they are using. Wasn’t that rumored to cost like $16 a piece?

You’re joking but you could totally have 10 digital (or analog) clocks - in different time zones if you want - that popup a calendar with events from one or multiple of 10 different calendars in different colors and you can also set the popups to stay pinned until manually closed if you want to. KDE’s widget system is extremely versatile.

Yeah, in general Windows 11 just assumes a lot of things “for” the user, and if you don’t like it you’re often out of luck or have to resort to third party tools to restore previous functionality.

Try KDE Plasma, you can put one clock on your second monitor that opens a calendar…or 10. Whatever you want, really.