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Comment by lapetitejort | Hacker News Reader

Companies iterating so quickly on their products might be their biggest weakness. Since its release, the Steam Deck hasn't been improved by releasing the Steam Upper Decker, but by a constant stream of software improvements, both to the OS, and also Proton. I know my device won't be handicapped by a replacement in six months.

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Valve has been really good at providing parts for fixing or even upgrading the deck from the very beginning. They even replaced the bad first edition fans for everyone who wanted - or you could order a new one and swap it yourself with picture by picture instructions.

Swapping the sticks to hall effect is like a two beer job. The battery is replaceable - and maybe upgradable in the future etc.

The Asus ROG Ally is more powerful than the Deck, but Asus isn't known for their after market support...

Asus is really good with bioses /s. I think I just saw info about them automagically pushing new Ally bios degrading performance by 25%.

Totally agree.

Love Xiaomi products, for example, but they realease so many phones per year that it feels like they never have time to polish them.

They might release like 30 different phones in a year!

Good thing that the EU is planning on mandating the amount of updates phones need to get[0]. It should cut down on the amount of phone model spam - or at least they get updated and not abandoned.

    The regulators have suggested that phone vendors provide at least five years of security updates and three years of OS updates to their devices. Moreover, the said security and operating system updates should reach users “at the latest two months after the public release.”

EDIT: it seems that te initiative has already passed: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...

[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/eu-smartphone-updates-rules...

How on EARTH do you make money with 30 different phone versions? Do apple/google/samsung TOGETHER even put out 30 phones a year? That seems absolutely not profitable but what do I know I guess!

There were even a time when they release a model, that were few millimeters off (height, width, thick and camera location) on the same named model for different countries. Have fun to buy a proper case for it.

By segmenting the markets to target different audiences. Same goes for GPU markets.

why doesn't apple make more different devices then? I guess they have been trending that way.. But still, how does "compartmentalizing" make up for 30 different production lines and whatever else can't be parallelized? Like the tiny differences the other reply noted, what is the difference in a consumer who picks the 3 mm bigger?? Do these "segments" of the market exist naturally or is it manufactured to some degree? ie If one year they suddenly consolidated down from 30 to 5, what % of customers would they really lose?!

Do you really need 30 segments? I don't think so.

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