[jeroenhd]

From what I've heard, hardware quality for the individual consoles seems to be a bit of a lottery. Some units arrive with scratched screens, stuck buttons, creaking plastic, all the works, while others are Just Fine.

In terms of price, I'm not surprised in the difference in build quality. Nintendo is shipping five year old smartphone boards out for a premium price, that means the plastics can receive quite a bit of love. You couldn't possibly play PC games on Switch level hardware, not even on the 800p screen. As a result, Switch games run just as well or even better on the Deck once an emulator dev puts in the optimisation effort for a Switch game, despite the ARM to x64 translation overhead.

The Deck's PC competition all costs twice or three times as much, usually for good reason. There are gaming handhelds out there that will come with good build quality and run Windows so things like DRM are not a problem, but you pay for that luxury. They used to be priced even higher but it's clear the Deck has disrupted this part of the industry quite significantly.

[kitsunesoba]

Nintendo has seemed to have gone the route of Texas Instruments calculators with its handhelds for a long time now. The 3DS must’ve cost almost nothing to make by the time they stopped selling it.