Last year I travelled alone on a flight from London to New York. The flight officially takes around eight hours, but from the time you get on the plane to the time you leave it’s probably more like nine or ten. As soon as I sat down in my assigned seat I took out my fully charged PlayStation Vita. I was playing the visual novel Norn9. I recommend it. Once I started to play, the man next to me decided to grab his Steam Deck, Valve’s ostensibly handheld console, before the flight.

He was storing his Steam Deck in his backpack that was sensibly stowed away in the overhead locker. As people were still shuffling down the aisle, there was a little hubbub getting the portable console to his seat, but with a few minutes of struggle it was secured. He sat down and turned it on. I noted that he also had a full battery. After some browsing through his library he settled on Hogwarts Legacy. After this I remained absorbed in my story until I heard a sigh.

I turned to the noise to see that his Steam Deck was dead. The sigh was not only because his Steam Deck was dead, not only because it can’t be charged from the weak plane USB chargers, but because we were still mid-take off and he couldn’t put the handheld away until the seatbelt sign was turned off. He wrestled a little to grab his headphones from the seat pocket in front of him with the Steam Deck teetered awkwardly on his lap. It was impeding him from doing anything else. Eventually the sign turned off, he put the Steam Deck back into the overhead locker and I never saw it again.

lol. The stupid fucking behemoths we get now instead of something actually usable.