From the app’s webpage:

Run Valve’s official Steam client in Big Picture mode on your Snapdragon handheld. Launch Windows games through ARM64 Proton with native Vulkan graphics—no root required.

I set this up on my Retroid Pocket 5 last night. The handheld isn’t the most powerful, but I was still impressed with the results. I tested Half-Life 2, Celeste, and Sonic Mania — all of which ran without any issues that I could find.

It’s amazing what Valve has made possible with all of their investment in Proton. And projects like DroidDeck have me wanted a more powerful handheld — maybe the Ayn Thor?

➝ Source: droiddeck.app

The Steam Machine will probably receive the most attention and for good reason. It’s essentially a more powerful Steam Deck in a home console form factor. And it’s much smaller than you would expect — it looks like a half-height Xbox Series X.

It’s worth watching the announcement video, even if you’re not too interested in video game hardware. It’s such a well produced video — it’s quick, no fluff, and flows nicely from one announcement to the next.

➝ Source: store.steampowered.com

From the announcement:

With Lenovo’s announcement at CES 2025 of the Lenovo Legion Go S, we are pleased to share that their “Powered by SteamOS” model is the first handheld officially licensed to ship with Valve’s SteamOS. We built this operating system to provide a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC. SteamOS is the same operating system we run on Steam Deck, and the team is making updates to ensure it fully supports the Lenovo Legion Go S and provides the same seamless experience customers expect.

In addition, the same work that we are doing to support the Lenovo Legion Go S will improve compatibility with other handhelds. Ahead of Legion Go S shipping, we will be shipping a beta of SteamOS which should improve the experience on other handhelds, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we’ll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases.

I imagine a lot of hardware manufacturers are happy to have an alternative operating system like this available to them.

➝ Source: steamcommunity.com

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for present-day Apple, there’s still a lot to be excited about in the world of technology. The following is an unordered list of things that I’ve been excited about recently. If you have any thoughts about the following items or have some tech that you’ve been excited about, I’d love to hear from you.

Old MacBooks

I recently purchased two 2015 11-inch MacBook Airs — one for myself and one for my wife. They can run up to macOS Monterey, which is still supported by Apple and by the vast majority of application developers. And if you’re willing to deal with potential pain points, you can use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to install macOS Sonoma on the machines as well.

I have Sonoma running on mine and it runs like a champ. Other than the non-retina display and lack of USB-C ports, these machines feel surprisingly modern.

Old MacBooks are also very easy to upgrade. In addition to the 2015 MacBooks that I recently purchased, I have a couple of older 2011 models that I’ve been toying with as well. The battery and storage has been a breeze to upgrade on these machines. I’ve put brand new batteries and 500GB SSDs in both and completed the tasks in less than ten minutes each.

Linux

An entire operating system, complete with its own selection of applications and features to explore. I’ve been doing so primarily through virtual machines on my work laptop, but I plan to dual boot Sonoma and Ubuntu 24.04 on my 11-inch MacBook Air now that this new long term support release is available.

The most interesting thing about Linux to me is the myriad of windowing managers. I can’t say its necessarily better than what we have on macOS, but it has plenty of innovative ideas that has me working a bit differently — using multiple virtual desktops never clicked with me on macOS like it has in Linux.

Self-hosting

There isn’t much that excites me more than being able to eliminate my reliance on a service controlled by someone else. I have three servers where I run various applications from my home office alongside a Linode and SiteGround account where I run services as well.

Plex and Mastodon likely get the most use from me, but I’m also a huge fan of Invidious, Miniflux, and Wallabag.

I’d like to self-host even more and should be doing so soon. I’m waiting on the arrival of an Umbrel Home. It should be here in the next few weeks. I have Umbrel running on an old Mac mini now, but it seems to bog down quite a bit when I have more than a few applications running on it. I expect the Umbrel Home should handle things a bit better.

Emulation Handhelds

I have a Retroid Pocket 2+ and a Retroid Pocket 3. Both of which are excellent devices for what they are, but I’d love to have something that features a bit more horsepower for PlayStation 2 and GameCube emulation.

I’ve been hemming and hawing over whether I want to get myself an Ayn Odin 2 or a Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. I believe both of them would be able to run the games I’m interested in, so it’s just a matter of which form factor is preferable to me.

I just love the idea of having a single device that can run all of the games from my childhood.

Emulation on the App Store

Apple updated their App Store guidelines earlier this month to allow for retro game emulators in the App Store. It’s still very early days and Delta appears to be the clear standout. It supports Nintendo systems up to Nintendo 64 and Nintendo DS.

I’m still using AltStore for now, though. Delta is a great emulator, but it just doesn’t compare to RetroArch in terms of the number of systems supported. I expect RetroArch will eventually make its way into the App Store, but that will take some time. I’m sure there are some changes that will need to be made to the app to fully come into compliance with Apple’s guidelines.

I’m okay using AltStore for now, but I’m excited about a future where I won’t have to resort to hacks in order to run this type of software on my own device.

PC Building

I built a gaming PC last fall, with the goal of having it run Steam as a headless home server. I’m using one of these inexpensive display emulators and interacting with the system entirely through Steam Link and VNC — using Screens. With this setup I can play any PC game I’d like and emulate more powerful systems from any device in the house — most often my iPhone and the living room Apple TV.

For anyone curious, here are the parts I used for the system:

• AMD Ryzen 5600 Processor
• AMD Radeon RX 7600 Graphics Card
• 32GB of Crucial DDR4 3200 Memory
• ASRock B550M-ITX/AC Motherboard
• 2TB Crucial NVMe Solid State Drive
• 4TB Samsung SATA Solid State Drive
• Fractal Terra Mini-ITX Case
• Noctua NH-L9x65 CPU Cooler
• Corsair SF750 Power Supply

It’s not the most powerful thing in the world, but it’s more than capable of playing everything I’ve thrown at it. And since I’m streaming everything over Steam Link, I’m not all that concerned about playing anything at high resolutions — 720p or 1080p are more than sufficient for my needs.

But with this project, I’ve started paying attention to the world of PC hardware again. Primarily through YouTube channels like Gamers Nexus, JayzTwoCents, optimum, ozTalksHW, and more. This is an area of tech that I haven’t really paid attention to since the early 2000s. And, boy, does it feel fresh and exciting in comparison to Apple hardware.

Steam Link

How amazing is it that you can just play games from your PC on all of your devices? I can have Skate 3 running in RPCS3 on a computer in my home office and use my iPhone as a display and a Backbone One as the controller. Or I can use the television in my living room paired with an Apple TV and an 8BitDo Pro 2 controller.

Steam Link is to video games as Plex is to movies and TV shows.

There are definitely times when the bandwidth just isn’t there, but most of the time everything works smoothly. And I’m sure it will get even better if I actually work on running ethernet to all of our Apple TVs — a project that never seems to receive the priority necessary to accomplish.

iPods

I recently purchased an iPod from Elite Obsolete Electronics. It was a 5.5-generation model that I paid to have modded with a 128GB microSD card and a brand new face plate, backplate, and click wheel.

I’ve since toyed around with just about every feature the device has to offer. I’ve added Click Wheel games, played around with the Notes feature, setup a preset in Handbrake to convert video to a compatible format, and it’s been a blast all along the way.

There’s something nice about using an offline device. Something that, by its very nature, only has the content that’s on it right now. If I want something new, I have to connect it to a computer and sync. It allows me to be a bit more intentional about the content I’m consuming.

Currently, the iPod is my primary method for podcast and audiobook listening. Huffduffer is a great tool that I’ve been getting a lot of use out of for adding random audio files to the iPod.

I’ve also been using the iPod for the majority of my YouTube viewing. I download the videos with my Invidious instance, convert them with the aforementioned Handbrake preset, and then add them to the Apple Music app for syncing — I’ve found it to be a bit easier to add them to the Apple Music app as music videos rather than adding them to the TV app.

I haven’t had an opportunity to try the app yet. As it turns out, it’s a bit difficult to request a password reset on a Steam account. I haven’t logged in to Steam in probably a decade and, naturally, can’t remember my password — I created the account back in my pre-1Password days.

So I’m waiting on a response from Steam’s support team to see if they’ll grant me access again. Until then, I’ll be anxiously waiting with my MFi controller at the ready.

Eli Hodapp, writing for TouchArcade:

Moments ago, Valve pushed out an updated version of the Steam Link app to TestFlight testers which aside from a few UI tweaks (like a network performance test when you first pair your PC which I’m fairly certain wasn’t in the original build) they also removed the ability to buy anything through the actual app itself. When you connect to your PC via the Steam Link app and browse the store, the button you used to be able to push to buy things has been changed to say “Available to purchase from your PC.”

Hopefully this is all the changes Valve needed to make and we’ll be streaming games to our Apple TVs soon.

John Voorhees, reporting for MacStories:

We now have a better idea of the reasons behind the Steam Link rejection thanks to an email message from Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, to a MacStories reader, the authenticity of which we have verified.

According to Phil Schiller’s reply, the Steam Link app violated “a number of guidelines around user generated content, in-app purchases, content codes, etc.” The good news is that apple is continuing to work with Valve to fix these issues and hopefully the app will be available soon.

John Voorhees, writing for MacStories:

A couple of weeks ago we reported that Valve was preparing to release an app called Steam Link that would allow gamers to stream Steam games to an Apple TV or iOS device over a fast WiFi or Ethernet network. The app was set to debut this week, but it was rejected by Apple’s App Review team. According to a press release from Valve, Steam Link was approved by App Review on May 7th and then rejected on May 10th, one day after Valve announced the app was coming to iOS and tvOS.

I can only assume that the Steam Link app surfaces the game store in a way that Apple wasn’t fond of. If that’s the case, this will hopefully be an easy fix and the app will be available soon. Unless Valve decides to pull an Amazon and refuses to make the necessary changes.

But if this is just another boneheaded decision by Apple to block an app that’s fully within the guidelines of the App Store, then this whole situation is bullshit and Apple needs to fix it.