Valve has been incredibly friendly to customers who need repairs — which is why it was so surprising to hear that Valve was already discontinuing the battery for the Steam Deck LCD handheld. It would have meant you could no longer just buy a battery from iFixit and install it yourself. Why would Valve stop stocking the most important replacement part just as people are starting to need it?
Here is Valve’s answer to The Verge, as of 5PM ET: “We just confirmed with iFixit that they plan to have batteries back in stock by next week.”
“iFixit will be getting the same OEM parts sourced through Valve’s partners that they always have,” spokesperson Kaci Aitchison Boyle tells me.
The Reddit story wasn’t necessarily false. Earlier today, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens confirmed to The Verge that it had indeed heard that Valve would no longer make replacement batteries or screens for the original Steam Deck LCD.
But by afternoon, Valve and iFixit had already managed to change that. “They have hooked us up with a supplier, we’re working on it,” Wiens now tells me. And if Valve does decide to sunset the part in the future, iFixit says it’ll be ready to take up the torch by using an aftermarket supplier instead. “I want people to know we are going to find a way to get batteries for these things,” says Wiens.
Wiens says Valve has “been a really great partner.” He suspects that Valve and its suppliers simply bet wrong on how many replacement parts they needed to produce.
“If you get the forecast wrong, you run out, or you go wrong in the other direction and spend way too much money on parts sitting around doing nobody any good.”
I keep hoping we’ll see electrically removable adhesive in handhelds; iFixit’s CEO tells me shock-to-release glues are “often too expensive to include in the original device,” but are possible aftermarket if you’re willing to spend “a couple bucks extra.”
Perhaps by the time you need an aftermarket battery from a different supplier, it’ll be even better than the original.