What handheld PCs should do to fight the Nintendo Switch 2

I stopped buying most games for my Nintendo Switch the day I bought a Steam Deck. My Switch has been a Mario and Zelda machine ever since. It’s simple: the Steam Deck took the Switch’s best trick — pick-up-and-play portability — while offering more games that run better. I can easily resume the ones I started on my desktop PC, or continue to play portable titles on my desktop and marvel at improved graphics. 

But the Nintendo Switch 2, coming later this year, may change that value proposition. Not only will it continue to be the console that attracts families and kids with inventive, surprising, must-try exclusive Nintendo games that use its detachable Joy-Cons’ many tricks, but it also has a real chance at convincing the enthusiasts who might otherwise buy a handheld gaming PC — or who were waiting for handheld PCs to become less of a wild west.

The Switch 2 may meet or beat the Steam Deck in performance. If history’s any indication, it should easily sell better than every handheld gaming PC combined. When the original Nintendo Switch launched nearly eight years ago, there was almost nothing to play but Zelda, and Nintendo held its game catalog in an iron grip — but now, the backwards-compatible Switch 2 will launch with one of the largest and most welcoming libraries of all time, rivaled only by smartphones and computers. The Switch could theoretically become the new baseline for game developers to target, and the most reliable place to find new handheld-friendly titles.

So: How can the budding handheld PC revolution escape the shadow of the Switch 2? I won’t say I know for sure, but I did just check the industry’s temperature at CES 2025, the world’s biggest tech show — and I’m afraid PC handhelds may stay in that shadow unless the industry does more. 

Handheld ergonomics was one bright spot going into 2025. While I still prefer the Deck’s overall feel, practically every PC handheld I touched had nicely sculpted grips that made them more comfortable to hold than their predecessors. From the 8-inch MSI Claw 8 AI Plus and Lenovo Legion Go S, to the 8.8-inch Legion Go 2, and the giant 11-inch Tencent Sunday Dragon, even the largest Windows handhelds didn’t feel as awkward as some of their first-gen predecessors.

There are four places I think the industry has to change — and maybe, band together — if these handhelds want a meaningful piece of the Switch. 

Buyers need to know that their game will be ready to play when they press the power button on a handheld. That’s the Nintendo Switch experience, and it’s similar to how the Steam Deck works once games are downloaded — but it’s far from what Windows handhelds currently offer.

That’s why the three biggest pieces of handheld gaming news at the show had little to do with the hardware itself. They were about ditching today’s version of handheld Windows. 

First, Lenovo revealed it would produce the first authorized third-party handheld to ship with Valve’s easy-to-use SteamOS instead of Windows — something only the Steam Deck has done so far. Second, Valve told us it would bring a SteamOS beta to additional third-party handhelds as soon as this April. Third, a Microsoft executive told The Verge that the company would finally do something meaningful about its bloated Windows experience on handhelds later this year, combining “the best of Xbox and Windows together.” 

These moves are heartening, as it’s a Wild West in handheld PC land. Most companies opt for a copy of Windows that doesn’t reliably launch games or sleep and wake properly, defeating some of the purpose of a pick-up-and-play handheld experience. They’re filled with difficult-to-navigate UI and unnecessary bloatware, too — to the point that today, a community-created fork of Valve’s SteamOS UI is already a far better experience than Windows. 

It’s also good for SteamOS fans: while the Steam Deck is a great platform for SteamOS, we’ve already seen the Deck can’t compete with the Switch by itself. Game publishers don’t see the raw sales numbers to bring big multiplayer games like Fortnite or Valorant to SteamOS. (They say cheaters are too big a risk.)

But, while the CES moves are significant, Valve, Microsoft, and Lenovo are non-committal about how much things might improve. Microsoft would only give me the barest hints about making Windows feel more like an Xbox game console at some point later this year. Lenovo is hedging its SteamOS bet hard — not only will the Legion Go S ship in both Windows and SteamOS varieties, the Windows version will go on sale months earlier, and Lenovo won’t commit to SteamOS for its larger, later-in-2025 handheld. 

No other company announced a SteamOS handheld at CES, either, save for PC maker GPD, with a claim that was apparently false or lost in translation. Valve told me it has no other partner devices currently in the works for SteamOS, though it’d be happy to work with more companies. I believe every handheld maker should give SteamOS a shot.

This one’s easy: to maximize performance, battery life, economies of scale, and offer a closer-to-game-console experience, handheld PC makers should universally adopt a 1080p-or-lower-resolution HDR OLED screen with variable refresh rate. 

Many PC manufacturers are wasting what little performance they can muster from a handheld chip and battery on a screen with far too many pixels for the task, artificially constraining performance and battery life in exchange for 1600p or 1200p sharpness that most gamers won’t miss on a 7-inch to 8-inch panel. Additionally, every handheld without a variable refresh rate screen is likely wasting a good chunk of the frames that their handheld can serve because their screen is artificially limiting their framerate — VRR was the Asus ROG Ally’s secret weapon, letting it play games more smoothly than competing handhelds even if rivals’ chips offered the same FPS.

Lastly, HDR is a revelation on the Steam Deck OLED’s screen, letting both native titles and the HDR games I stream from my PS5 feel like they’re filled with real light that explodes out of the screen. It’s something Windows desktops and laptops have never consistently offered the way today’s consoles do, but handhelds could be the gateway to changing that.

Is a screen like the one I’m describing expensive or hard to find? Band together, PC companies, and surely a display maker can change that for you.

Unless you count the Nvidia Tegra at the heart of the Nintendo Switch, AMD is the leader in handheld chips. But its semi-custom Aerith and Sephiroth parts for the Steam Deck feel like the only ones proactively designed with power-sipping handhelds in mind, leaving everyone else at a portability disadvantage. And it sounds like AMD’s new Z2 line might not be all that different.

AMD’s Z1 batch of chips in handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally wasn’t originally for handheld; they’re mildly tweaked laptop processors that need 17 or 18 watts to begin to hit their stride, enough for a complete handheld to drain a typical 50Wh battery pack in well under three hours with mildly intensive games.

The Z2 line is similarly a set of tweaked laptop chips, and while AMD told me some may offer more performance at the same power and add improved efficiency tweaks, the total consumed power may not decrease. Lenovo product manager Alex Zhu told me it’s looking at running its Legion Go S’s Z2 Go chip at around 20 watts, which might give it worse battery life than the 15-watt-and-below Steam Deck even if its GPU is more capable. AMD also confirmed the Z2 Go is less powerful than the prior-gen Z1 Extreme.

AMD senior fellow Mahesh Subramony told me the company’s flagship Z2 Extreme chip, on TSMC’s shrunk-down N4P process node with a mix of newer Zen 5, Zen 5c and RDNA 3.5 cores, should be both more efficient and much more capable than the Z2 Go, and quite a bit better than the Z1 Extreme as well, but it’s not a leap forward. That may require AMD’s even newer RDNA 4 graphics, and it may require bespoke processors.

Don’t hold your breath if you’re hoping Intel might provide meaningful competition in the handheld chip realm. While early reviews of the Intel Lunar Lake chip in the revised MSI Claw 8 AI Plus are quite promising, its pricey Lunar Lake chip may be a bit of a one-off, with future Intel parts steering away from the power-saving on-die memory that Intel experimentally added. I’m curious if that’s why MSI hasn’t fully launched the Claw as expected.

Meanwhile, Intel certainly has bigger fish to fry right now than making custom handheld chips. “It’s not a market that we’re actively pursuing, but it’s a market we’re happy to enable,” Intel VP of technical marketing Robert Hallock tells me of handheld gaming. “It is somewhat extracurricular,” he added, explaining that it’s a fun and exciting but small market and that Intel has to pick its battles. “We’re coming off admittedly, about five, six years of strife and we have to decide where we want to invest.”.

Some manufacturers have been able to improve the battery life disadvantage of today’s off-the-shelf AMD chips by including a much larger battery pack — the Asus ROG Ally X doubled the size of its predecessor’s pack to 80 watt-hours, and it’s no longer the only 80Wh handheld you can buy. But that comes with size and weight tradeoffs that can only be partially engineered away.

We need handheld makers to join together and make a case for better chips.

The PC industry also needs to cut prices if it wants a chance to eat Nintendo’s lunch. 

The Nintendo Switch debuted at $299 in 2017 — around $380 in today’s money — and the OLED version arrived at $349 in 2021. A year later, Valve’s Steam Deck debuted at $399. But today, the only Windows handheld gaming PC I can recommend costs $799, roughly twice the price of an entry-level Deck, and most Windows handhelds have started at $600 and up. High-end options are great, but the space may remain niche without low-end options, too. 

Only the least expensive model of Lenovo’s SteamOS variant of the Legion Go S will lower that bar to $499 this May. And all of those prices are still more than Sony or Microsoft charges for a TV console with far more performance, and likely more than Nintendo will charge for the Switch 2.

I’m not sure what exactly PC makers would need to do to challenge the Switch on price, but it’s likely not simple. Valve CEO Gabe Newell said it was “painful” but “critical” to launch the Steam Deck at $399, hinting that the company may have followed the razor-and-blades business model where console makers initially sell hardware at a loss, then make the money back as people buy games. If so, that’s a tough act to follow, as no other PC maker controls the world’s largest PC games store and can afford to subsidize a handheld that way.

But not every console has been a loss leader: Nintendo reportedly never sold the Switch at a loss, and Sony stopped selling the PS5 at a loss less than a year after its debut. So it’s possible to cut prices with the right bill of materials and economies of scale. Lenovo explicitly told me it worked with AMD on the Z2 Go chip to help lower the Legion Go S’s price, for example.

To compete with Nintendo, a company like Microsoft or Valve or even Sony needs to lead the charge, securing the components and offering the right operating system for dozens of true Switch competitors Imagine dozens of portable Xboxes or PlayStations or Steam Machines, instead of each PC maker marching to the beat of their own drum.

I think it’s time for an industry-wide push on handheld gaming. It might be the future of gaming, period. There’s too much at stake to tackle it one half-baked Windows handheld at a time.