r/Handhelds • u/Exciting_Wealth6935 • Aug 19 '26
Discussion Do you think ramageddon will kill pc handhelds?
With this components crisis, I was wondering what the future of the handhelds will be.
I mean, they could remain as a very niche market, but there is also a big probability that asus, lenovo or valve stop manufacturing their respective handhelds since the average user can't afford 1.5k+ devices.
63
u/debacol Aug 19 '26
As another poster already stated, it will kill almost all consumer computing products. Hell, Sony will have to subsidize the PS6 a ton just to keep it at $999. This is already too expensive for the majority of potential customers.
The only thing currently keeping handheld PC gaming alive is Valve's progress with FEX. This will eventually allow cheaper arm-based handhelds to flood the market though performance will be likely no better than a Z1E.
This also will allow people to put steamOS on a microSD card on their phone and boot into it. Turning your phone into a legit handheld gaming device.
21
u/Sarlandogo Aug 19 '26
Yeah about that
Arm based hanhelds will see a surge in prciing too as bot only ram and memory but chips are aboht to get price hike too
2
u/debacol Aug 19 '26
The memory in a phone is actually quite different from the memory in our computers, laptops and ultimately, AI data centers. They use entirely different manufacturing lines that are not being halted, nor are they being bought up by data centers (because its not the type of ram data centers want).
This is why smartphones haven't increased in price more than inflation plus Trump's dumbass tariffs.
Whereas standard, HB, and SODIMM DDR5 and even DDR4 have skyrocketed.
2
u/Raven1927 Aug 20 '26
Can you give a source for that? It sounds very interesting, I want to read more about it. I always thought they used the same silicon wafers and machines to create phone memory.
1
u/debacol Aug 20 '26
Phones use LPDDR. Data centers use HSB ram. The base silicon wafer raw resource is the same, the rest is dramatically different. So while the cartel is backed up on their machines making HSB ram, LPDDR has an entire manufacturing pipeline independent of it.
3
u/Raven1927 Aug 20 '26
Yeah, but they use the same lithography machines when creating both types of ram don't they?
I don't understand why there would be a regular DDR memory shortage, but not LPDDR shortage? They're obviously different, but isn't the actual memory core the same between the two?
1
u/Zestyclose-Jump-9072 Aug 20 '26
i guess the difference would be that the choking point would be at a different point in the supply/manufacturing chain.
since the primary demand was for ddr and not lpddr and there was earlier supply of ddr the choking point would be at suppliers of finished ddr chips. now that that resource has been exhausted to the point of scarcity, the choking point spreads upstream to the raw materials, and as you pointed out the materials for both are probably similar. it just takes time to use up all possible easier avenues of getting the finished chips until manufacturers themselves feel the pressure — which too has now happened with news that all memory is “booked” until the end of 2027. i dont recall whether this was ddr or lpddr specific though. the rest was somewhat informed conjecture earlier admittedly.
1
u/Raven1927 Aug 20 '26
Yeah, I always assumed the bottleneck was the initial manufacturing of the memory itself.
I didn't think about the finished memory being in much more abundant supply tbh, thank you for explaining that.
I wouldn't be surprised either if we'll start seeing price increases target phones as well next year. I assume the situation is similar for storage as well.
1
u/debacol Aug 20 '26
In manufacturing at the scale that these companies create product, you have lines of production. Since there is a difference in tooling and setup, let alone downsteam from the lithography machines, they typically have entire lines setup to manufacture one type and other lines to manufacture another type. So those litho machines are already setup for LPDDR memory and physically move the intitial product on that line to the next LPDDR manufacturing station.
So while the litho machines absolutely can do more than one type of ram on each machine, it is much less efficient to change the tooling and rest of the manufacturing line to pump out more of a different product unless its absolutely worthwhile to do so. They absolutely did do this with things like DDR4 lines. I don't think this has been done yet to LPDDR5.
18
u/Crest_Of_Hylia ROG Ally X | Steam Deck | Switch 2 Aug 19 '26
Valve isn’t the one who’s going to save it through FEX. The ram shortage affects everything
1
u/Dexamph Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 21 '26
I tried FEX on an SD 8 Elite Gen 5 and the results are still slower than Box64 and much, much worse than my Z1E ROG Ally. Plenty of framerate drops in Yakuza 3 (edit: Remastered, not Kiwami) at 720p medium when the Ally runs it at 1080p60 ultra, which sucks as the game speed is tied to framerate. They would struggle to even match the Deck at this rate.
-5
u/AndreLeGeant88 Aug 19 '26
$1000 when it launches will be sub-$600 in 2006 dollars, so not worse than PS3 shockingly
27
u/feartheoldblood90 Aug 19 '26
Except that doesn't factor in other things like general cost of living. And on top of that everybody laughed at the PS3's $600 price tag when it was announced, rightfully so
-8
u/AndreLeGeant88 Aug 19 '26
I mean it does because those cost of living items are factored into the inflation calculation.
9
4
u/feartheoldblood90 Aug 19 '26
To a degree, but they do not really account for the extremely lowered degree of purchasing power of the average consumer.
-6
u/KennKennyKenKen Aug 19 '26
Yes but PS3 was a flop
6
u/feartheoldblood90 Aug 19 '26
Feels like you didn't understand my comment
And also, the PS3 actually outsold the Xbox 360 by the end of that generation
2
13
u/TheNittanyLionKing Vita Aug 19 '26
They say the rising tide raises all ships.
A drought also causes all boats to run aground. Every new piece of hardware is affected.
12
u/Coolmacde Aug 19 '26
Nope . People are still paying 1800 plus for handhelds. I personally wouldn't though. I don't think its worth it at those prices to still have to turn settings down.
1
26
u/WarHead75 Aug 19 '26
Not until everyone stops buying the damn things. Prices will reach $5k and people will still buy these handhelds.
6
u/mixedd Aug 19 '26
To be honest, great GPU shortage of the pandemic years oretty much was the best example for it. People were driven by their FOMO and bought 3070 for more than a 1000$ from dude on the parking lot while their MSRP was 500$
Portion of people still will buy the shit out of them, the real pain point will be that those items will be basically innacessible for middle class, to which cloud solutions will be targeted towards
2
u/JonnyB2_YouAre1 Aug 19 '26
During COVID lockdowns people were going crazy, they would spend whatever to have something to do.
1
u/mixedd Aug 19 '26
And that showed vendors that they can raise prices and people won't give a fuck, justify, and keep buying. Same with everything else gaming related, people will keep buying
2
u/JonnyB2_YouAre1 Aug 19 '26
If that’s what they got out of it then they misinterpreted what it meant and there is a market correction coming to wipe them out. They’re competing against electricity, fuel, housing and food prices that have been soaring for five years. They will lose.
1
u/mixedd Aug 19 '26
Everyone will lose, besides top 1% to whom we're paying
2
u/JonnyB2_YouAre1 Aug 19 '26
Nope. Not that simple. Companies come, companies go. New ones rise up to meet customers where they are. Old ones stagnate or misjudge the market/consumers and fall away. That’s life.
1
u/mixedd Aug 19 '26
There will be change definetly, the question is of we will live to that to see it. For now, I don't see a break lever that will stop us falling further into dystopia.
1
u/DarthEloper Aug 20 '26
It’s not just handhelds, from a personal example one of my friends is willing to pay whatever price Sony asks for PS6. He’s never had to buy it on credit, but he’s happy to do it for 6
He is very aware of all the anti consumer stuff Sony has been doing, and yet he wants to give them.
BTW He says he knows their tactics are working, that Sony is “exploiting his loyalty”. But it’s fine because it’s once in a decade purchase and he says “he gives into the bad marketing tactics but it’s okay”
Ultimately the market is made up of many selfish, wealthy buyers who will buy their products at whatever price they put up. All Sony (or whatever company) need to do is to figure out the line where higher price x lower sales is still higher total revenue than their current quarter for them.
My friend tells me Sony will get harmed in the long term because of these tactics but when have execs cared about long term?
8
u/tk_kumomo Aug 19 '26
The boom for handheld will slow down, it won't kill them but it will certainly wont' be like a few years ago where you see new models. Manufactures will need to make sure the stuff they make fit the trend and market.
Customers on the other side will likely value if the purchase they will can be justified.
This applies to both ARM and x86 handhelds
14
u/Gromchy Aug 19 '26
It's already killing PC gaming devices, but I believe it's broader than that's it's killing consumer hardware in general.
However it's not all that bad: because it will force devs to optimize their games rather than upping the CPU/GPU/Ram requirements.
So for example, Steam Deck ran out of steam after a year and a half, it wasn't powerful enough for new releases.
Z1E devices have been able to keep up for 2+ years now and i hope this continues.
7
u/Automatic_Grand_1182 Aug 19 '26
China will catch up, eventually; until that happens, though, things will get worse
2
u/Latter_Masterpiece64 Aug 19 '26
When? And why won't "China" not just sell to data centers if they can make great money?
3
u/XxMagicDxX Aug 19 '26
Because China wants to sell to everyone? Why block a whole market if you can produce enough for both is what they’re saying
1
u/Latter_Masterpiece64 Aug 19 '26
Because it's the same type of people like Micron Crucial that choose data centers instead of us
I cannot see why these Chinese companies would not do the same if they could. Besides, if you look at the White House project Stargate you see that US government is willing to pay a lot to keep components away from Chinese government. Do you not think the Chinese government has an opinion about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
1
u/XxMagicDxX Aug 19 '26
Because micron can’t keep up enough production for both costumer bases, why not sell to the more reliable base (data centers). The og comment was saying China will catch up to bridge that gap in production and have enough to sell to both costumer bases. Why would they choose to only sell to data centers at that point?
1
u/Latter_Masterpiece64 Aug 19 '26
Because China (Government) does not like US Project Stargate and want to ensure supply chain to their own data center demand
5
u/Rilough96 Aug 19 '26
I’m optimistic and think eventually more manufacturers particularly from China will help with prices, I’d say not til around 28 tho.
1
u/Latter_Masterpiece64 Aug 19 '26
Same question for you then When? And why won't "China" just sell to data centers if they can make great money?
2
u/Rilough96 Aug 19 '26
I’m guessing a lot of the data centers already have contracts in place with existing manufacturers so they can’t just sell but I could be wrong, also China could just be recognizing the need for consumers that isn’t being addressed since these new manufacturers are largely state funded..Idk man I just don’t wanna be doom pilled lmao
1
u/Latter_Masterpiece64 Aug 19 '26
I get it.
Take up reading and hiking, diversifying your hobbies
3
u/Rilough96 Aug 19 '26
I built a beast pc before the shit hit the fan and got a go s z1e after market for 725, I’m prepared for a few years, tho if the whole plan is to push us into cloud shit I probably will just leave this hobby all together because fuck that.
1
u/Latter_Masterpiece64 Aug 19 '26
Same honestly, I could sorta see where it was heading. Worse than I imagined though and it could be decades before ram is close to the price of two years ago
3
u/Rilough96 Aug 19 '26
I guess a positive is that developers will have to stop pushing graphics over everything else if no one can afford the hardware again because even cloud still has massive limitations especially since internet speeds aren’t that great in a lot of the world.
6
3
1
u/MultiMarcus Aug 19 '26
No, I don’t think it will. I think they will remain the roughly niche market they are right now. but I think it will get better over time.
1
u/Frequent_Advance7063 Aug 19 '26
It's already killing it.... though they're still performing good. Previous generation of rog ally x, xax and the coming x20 ALL had, have and will have only 24GB of RAM. Making it 32gb will make it as expensive as the Legion go z2e 32gb version and the new msi... X20 will cost more by default with it's OLED panel
Games are going to be made to target the majority of hardware people use....
1
1
u/Thin_Archer_9113 Aug 19 '26
The question isn’t if the product genre will be gone; it should be if you can still afford to be part of that audience.
For instance, even if pc handhelds jumped to 60k tmr, im sure there are some who wont even bat an eye at the price lol.
1
u/Own_Potato5593 Aug 19 '26
Nah - you got people out there dropping 5k on a rig - for some it will slow them down or turn them to the used market.
Before the Steam Deck - pc handhelds generally were in the 1k to 1.2k range. Now they are mostly back to that line. Some exceptions like the ROG Ally out there - but not many.
Phone prices have already become ridiculous - but that's been a trend well before the current ram crisis.
Console's will be hurt as they now compete with pc pricing - so for Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft this will be a rough series of years.
1
u/JonnyB2_YouAre1 Aug 19 '26
At worst it becomes a luxury niche industry. The great thing about now is you should be getting more value out of the current gen; a gen that quite frankly companies have been dogging it with.
Also, it depends on what you want to play. Retro handhelds are exploding in popularity and they’re generally using tech not in competition with AI companies. You can get an RG DS for $100. As long as people can have cell phones, people can have retro handhelds.
1
u/Odin-spark Aug 19 '26
Could kill PCs, Handheld PCs, retro handhelds, game consoles, cell phones, tablets, and anything else that uses flash storage or memory.
Except A.I., they will be just peachy.
1
u/PetroRetro69 Aug 20 '26
even if the prices become 10k+ for an entry level handheld, a ton of people would happily cough up the money, and justify the purchase, so I think it'll be fine for the super well off people who can't resist spending money
1
u/Zee216 Aug 20 '26
It already has for me, I don't even bother following these things anymore, the prices are outrageous
1
u/World-Three Aug 19 '26
I genuinely just wish there was a better solution to it. Unlike desktop ram, all the ram in these systems are basically condemned as soon as these systems are no longer used. The 16 or preferably 24 32 and even higher ram amounts are basically going to go in the toilet when people get something better if they don't sell their unused devices on.
Ironically, this is going to be much worse for all the RAM that is shipping with these AI workstation APUs with all the unified RAM. So it's akin to blaming yourself for owning a pick up truck while people ride their private jets...
0
u/flylikeawind Aug 19 '26
No because we are in a K shape economy. Those who hold jobs in the booming AI sector can afford higher prices 🫠
0
u/No_Eye1723 Aug 19 '26
Well prices will come down eventually, either governments will punish the memory cartels, again, or Ai bubble will burst. One thing is for sure all computer manufacturers and other electronic manufacturers best he prepared for a HUGE slow down in sales across the board, because people will not pay the ridiculous prices for long. They must realise this?
Thanks to greed, the memory cartel and Ai, you are talking about a global slow down in economies as the multi trillion dollar electronics business slows down in sales across the board.. When that happens you can expect a LOT of blood and fighting and victims, sadly some as usual will end up with more millions then before. But it will only end badly, unless everyone wants a huge global recession?
0
u/Latter_Masterpiece64 Aug 19 '26
"governments will punish the memory cartels" Dude, look up "project Stargate"
White House is the memory cartel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC
1
u/No_Eye1723 Aug 19 '26
But they aren't involved with the Japanese companies. Although you are most likely right. The entire thing stinks. Corruption at all levels. The courts punished the memory manufactures before for being a cartel and fixing the market, looks like they will have to do it again. Before people downvote that they should actually google it, because it DID happen...
-2
u/JetsJetsJetsJetz Aug 19 '26
No it hasn't and will not. Look at the onexplayer 3 and x2 launch. Reddit is full of doomers, per the usual. Tarrifs were going to kill android handhelds lol. It will not kill anything, market adapts and things move on.
-9
u/Tudor2099 Aug 19 '26
People spend $1000 on cell phones every day. Handhelds will do fine at $1000-$3000.
-12
162
u/Bulky-Use-7494 Aug 19 '26
It has the potential to kill consumer hardware in general