The thing that irks me about these new model releases is I don’t want to upgrade for a minor improvement and then a year later a new model with slightly better improvements drops and I have to spend another $300+ for it. I’d rather Valve to offer the ability to open a return request and upgrade for the price of the modules and they upgrade your old model Deck with new parts you selected. It also keeps older model Steam Decks in circulation and keeps them relevant and prevents waste.
I mean, we don’t ask laptop manufacturers to do this, why are we asking Valve for this? Valve has stated that they treat this like a PC just in a different form factor.
Keep in mind that even though there’s no major performance upgrade, much of the Deck OLED was redesigned from the ground up. They’d pretty much have to rebuild your Deck if they offered an “upgrade” program that you’re asking for. The internals are very much different compared to the original Deck.