When a cushion wears out, a battery fades, or a display breaks, there’s a plausible repair ahead of you. But the heat management’s a little more buried.
The mobile chip they used is nothing special, it’s a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a 3 year old smartphone processor (certainly powerful enough to run lighter PC games, but nothing more than that. It’s kind of insane that a phone can even do that nowadays!)
Actually, you can totally run some more demanding PC games on it without any issues. A Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, so slightly weaker, is able to run The Witcher 3 at 720p, Steam Deck preset, in 30+ fps.
And that’s with several compatibility layers in between the SoC and the game.
Mobile ARM chips have come so far we might as well be using them for laptops instead of Intel or AMD (just like the recent MacBook Neo using an iPhone chip). More than good enough performance, especially in case of 8 Elite, at a fraction of the power draw.
Actually, you can totally run some more demanding PC games on it without any issues. A Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, so slightly weaker, is able to run The Witcher 3 at 720p, Steam Deck preset, in 30+ fps.
And that’s with several compatibility layers in between the SoC and the game.
Mobile ARM chips have come so far we might as well be using them for laptops instead of Intel or AMD (just like the recent MacBook Neo using an iPhone chip). More than good enough performance, especially in case of 8 Elite, at a fraction of the power draw.