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.
The old deck will be able to play exactly the same games as the OLED one. This is not a forced update. They haven’t stuck an RDNA 3 chip in it forcing you to upgrade for performance - there are just some nice quality of life improvements and will hopefully get more people into the space. Personally think valve smashed it out of the park with this one