Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The ROG Ally is here – What’s Next?”.
With the Advent of the Rog Ally, what other big tech companies do, you think are going to throw their hat in the ring of handheld gaming PCs, while the second Asus does anything gigabyte and MSI will do it, so that will certainly happen um man other than That I would be surprised if Del Alienware didn’t have a product like this. I mean they showed one off ages ago. It’S it’s for them. It wouldn’t even be coming out of nowhere. Have you called them that before yeah Del Alienware yeah, I don’t think I’ve heard? That was great. I don’t think I came up with it. Oh really, yeah.
I think that’s a thing first time for me as well. I like that a lot. I don’t know why.
Oh man, okay, yeah. I I this honestly for a while I’ve been expecting it from delalienware um, but I think they might be kind of late, but it’ll probably be like solid but late yeah, because when when did they show that thing off Alienware turn to gaming? Yeah, here’s a here’s, a video from The Verge from over three years ago, CES 2020, where they did uh like uh like a Nintendo, switch, sort of form, factor, gaming, PC and then Alienware concept NYX. They apparently did it again at CES 2022. Oh, what is this? No, no, that’s that’s something else entirely. So no yeah, it’s that 2022.
It was the UFO concept. So if Dell, if Dell Alienware did it, then that wouldn’t surprise me at all and then, if they do it, you know, I think other tier ones like I. I would be very surprised if the acers and Lenovo Legions of the world didn’t come in and try and compete in the space, because the thing is, I’m actually surprised. It’S taken this long.
If you kind of get what I mean, because if these companies can engineer a laptop yeah, what’s the difference, it’s a lot of like stuff to jam in there it is, but it also isn’t have you opened up a Chromebook recently yeah, but that’s a Chromebook. It’S not like a this is a Chromebook, the whole thing’s integrated the CPU, the GPU, but it’s more powerful. It’S an SOC, well powerful from what standpoint right, because we’re talking we’re talking like 30 Watts. Oh wow, geez yeah, it’s nothing! So you have as long as you sort of fundamentally understand cooling.
No, but I guess what I’m trying to say is we’re talking about timeline like how did it happen this late, but like technology, technological advancement, sure I mean that’s fair enough, but I just mean: why are why are they getting blindsided by the Ally? Why weren’t? They just the Allies may be a little bit surprising to me. The steam deck is not because, as we’ve talked about before, it’s heavily subsidized by steam game sales, so you can kind of make it in an expensive way and then not very it’s it’s like how they used to lose money selling consoles. Apparently they still are really yeah. I doubt the PS5 is losing money, but I I’d be surprised if they’re making money on Xbox series s, what would be the point in losing money on a PS5 um sell more games.
I mean same same as at all but like when they were like sold out stores for three years or something like I don’t know whatever um but yeah. I that I don’t know. I I’m surprised at the. I feel like I’m almost the opposite.
I’M not surprised that the other ones are so late. I’M surprised the Allies so early. Really! Oh, because I didn’t expect another competitor to steam deck.
That is as good as the Ally seems to be this fast. That was very surprising to me. Well, the steam deck was already a generation behind for CPU Tech, and our dna3 was already on the horizon for desktop gpus, so we knew that architecturally AMD had already laid the ground.
No, I get that it’s possible, I’m just surprised that they actually reacted that quickly. I guess because this is like a whole new product segment, all this kind of stuff yeah, but it’s not that fast ing. I guess I’m kind of trying to say is how long ago did the steam deck launch. Is this like further back than I hearing more yeah, because about a year I think was when they started showing it one year to create an entirely new product? Well, that’s the thing with manufacturing and everything like Del Alienware Asus has had their eye on this.
For quite a while, they’ve been working on prototypes on the like in the back room right a little over a year, older, yeah and, and the thing is they’re used to working on that product development cycle. That’S the thing: okay, that’s the part of the puzzle. Maybe you’re missing here is because Intel launches a new generation of CPUs every year, so they’re iterating start to finish on a product in a year. Every time already, yeah, yeah and they’re doing they’re doing different manufacturing because they’re not yeah, yeah, that’s fair enough, and so anytime they put a new chat, bring a new chassis to Market fast as heck.
But these companies, I guess, are used to dealing with that tax frame. That’S literally their entire job, is to get some pre-production, broken ass, silicon from Intel and AMD, or whoever else kind of go. Okay yeah, as long as the final product is somewhat Within These thermal and power specifications, we’re going to start designing around this. They do up all the tooling they get the final they get the final silicon.
They build these a handful of these things to show it. Trade shows – and then you know, two months later: they’re rolling off the mass production lines and they’re shipping to customers. That’S what they do. So it’s kind of mind-blowing to me that MSI doesn’t have a companion and gigabyte doesn’t have uh.
They would call it supporter. You know, support support class yeah, you know whatever right, I I don’t know, and maybe they do. Maybe they just don’t want to tip their hand. Maybe they want to see how the Ally goes in typical sort of CopyCat fashion, and you know if it goes really well, then they LeapFrog, that’s.
The position I feel like Dell is in. I feel, like Dell moves slower on this kind of stuff. They don’t yes to yeah. No, I know like they’re the First with they were the first with an OLED gaming monitor first mover Dell Alienware yeah, but the like product segment was more stable.
They were actually first with an OLED business, monitor as well way back in the day. That was a disaster that product launch. Okay. Well that didn’t work out yeah. I ordered one because I they wouldn’t send me a review sample and I was sure I knew why, because it wouldn’t get burned in because it was a very early OLED, and so I bought one.
I was like okay I’ll order. Your stupid 1200 monitor or whatever, even though I really don’t want one um and it got broken in shipping and in the time between me ordering it and trying to RMA it, they discontinued it and wouldn’t send me another one. So I think what happened? Is they probably just realized every single one of these things they sold was going to come back and just scrapped them? That’S kind of brutal yeah. That’S what I suspect happened. I’Ve never confirmed that, but I’m I’m pretty pretty it’s pretty sus.
It’S pretty sus that whole thing how that went down, but but no squid, hominid and float plane shot said going with the names companion and supporter here is even funnier. If you remember that it was almost called the steam pal [ Laughter ], that’s pretty good it. What actually, oh, my gosh, I’m I’m still pretty surprised. They went with steam deck with stream deck already existing yeah.
I think I feel like if anything I accidentally call this steam deck yeah more than I accidentally call a steam deck a stream deck, though yeah so valve one yeah. Oh, they like immediately won it’s just kind of it’s surprising, because they’re so close, like companies, usually don’t like touching that much. You know. .