Valve’s portable gaming PC is best served in a giant aluminum tube.

The Steam Deck lets me do something no other device ever meaningfully has: Play PC games at 35,000 feet. That’s probably not why almost anyone bought a Deck, and will never move an appreciable number of units as a selling point. But it’s legitimately the only reason I’ve kept mine, a year later.

Soaring through the skies, the Deck offers near-magical escapism.

And in that same year, I found nothing else about the Steam Deck compelling. The performance is passable, but unremarkable. The dock accessory is legitimately baffling. (Who wants games on their TV that look, perform, and respond worse than a modern console?) The number of compatible titles is decent, but hardly a draw. It’s heavy, it’s not actually all that portable, and the battery life is appalling by the standards of modern personal electronics. The Steam Deck is a case study in compromise. And yet.

Soaring through the skies, the Deck offers near-magical escapism. Yes, you need a pretty much constant connection to an electric outlet, but it works fully offline and can credibly play AAA titles like Death Stranding, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Ace Combat 7. Its little fan whirs away angrily, and you’d never hear it over the constant WHARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR of a jetliner engine. Besides, pairing up the Deck with your ANC headphones is a no-brainer. Once you’ve settled into your aluminum-framed torture apparatus, the Deck almost feels designed for the task at hand: Distraction at any cost.

I’ve passed long hours with the Deck on flights, and more than once have noticeably been the envy of my seat mates, twiddling their thumbs or mindlessly paging through email and spreadsheets on their laptops. I watched a man less-than-covertly enraptured as I maneuvered my miniature F-22 Raptor in Ace Combat through a hornet’s nest of automated combat drones gone rogue. My hands tilted and grasped the Deck in mock distress — absolute theater by the standards of personal movement on an Airbus. I physically sighed in relief every time I’d clear a new level, the exhilaration of the arcade combat flight raising my heart rate and making my palms perspire.

The Deck is the Spruce Goose of gaming: It shouldn’t be able to fly, but however improbably, it does.

No doubt, an Animal Crossing bender on Nintendo Switch has similar bystander appeal — and makes for far less forearm strain. But there is still something very… robust about the Steam Deck. It is an unnaturally brute gaming force, using its beefy battery, AMD GPU, and comical dimensions to will a stationary hobby into mobility. The Deck is the Spruce Goose of gaming: It shouldn’t be able to fly, but however improbably, it does.

Back on the ground, Valve’s portable gaming PC feels like a radical — and radically underwhelming — proof of concept. The eight-inch display is in a constant war of distance with your eyes as the sheer mass of the system compels it into a lap-resting or tabletop position. Ever tried playing a Steam Deck lying down? I lose feeling in one of my hands within 20 minutes trying to support the heavyweight of handhelds. It dies so quickly that I’ve seen it give up the ghost while I fish around for a cord. And you can never escape the knowledge that even the lowly Xbox Series S, let alone a modestly powerful gaming PC, smokes the Deck in any meaningful performance or fidelity metric.

In almost any situation, the Steam Deck is the wrong tool for the job. It’s bad on the couch, it’s bad on the TV, and it’s bad out in the world. That may sound like a damning critique, and I suppose it is. I stopped using it around the house months ago, and there is nothing Valve or anyone could do to change that. Short of making the Deck fold up into something as thin as an iPad and as light as a DualShock, I don’t think there is much “innovation” that can change the inherently compromised nature of its existence. Marginal improvements in performance, battery life, and weight would just mean a slightly less deeply impractical handheld gaming system. Which is to say, a still deeply impractical handheld gaming system.

In 10 or 15 years, though, when the original Deck will be just a Wikipedia museum exhibit to visit on our fanless, rollable display PlayStation UltraGo, I’ll still remember it like the Spruce Goose it is: big, stupid, and weirdly lovable. Just don’t ask me why, because I’m still not entirely sure.