Today in Multicore: news

Apple, Sonos, Playdate, and more

Welcome back to Multicore for Thursday, March 9th.

I haven't done a general news roundup in a minute because there hasn't been enough news of late to make it worthwhile. This week, there has! So let's catch up.

To follow up on Tuesday's issue marking a year of the Steam Deck, I liked this interview in Rock Paper Shotgun with Valve designer Lawrence Yang and engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais, which contained an interesting statistical nugget:

"It's been great to see", says Griffais of the Steam Deck’s Year One reception. "The most surprising thing to me has been the variety of use cases we've seen. We certainly intended for the Deck to be flexible and let you play how you want, but what we've seen come out of the community continues to blow our minds."

Yang agrees, and offers a surprising stat on just how deep the handheld has taken root. "Internally, we've loved using Steam Deck through all of its prototype stages, and it's been amazing to see customers in the wild having just as much fun now that we've shipped", he says. "The biggest surprise for me has been seeing how Steam Deck has changed the way people are playing their games. One thing we've learned recently is that of the people who've purchased a Steam Deck, 42% of them end up spending the majority of their Steam gaming time on Steam Deck – preferring it over their other devices."

That 42% stat is notable. I imagine it includes a lot of people who bought the Deck as their first or only gaming PC, but it also speaks to the product's ability to supplant a traditional setup as well. As I said, it really is a unique computer.