In an interview with The Verge, Valve engineers discussed several details regarding the second generation.
Two Valve engineers, Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais, are tall an interview Given to The Verge, in which they covered in detail the expected novelties of the next-gen Steam Deck.
New release
A little bit of that being said, there certainly isn’t much set in stone in regards to Steam Deck 2, as the designers aren’t quite finished with the hardware yet. Given the criticisms and comments about the current generation, it seems likely that they want to improve battery replaceability, as well as the fan noise level. Both are problems for themselves in iFixit Attention has been drawn. Replacing the latter isn’t a miracle, and iFixit also offers quieter fans, but obviously ideal if the customer doesn’t have to mess with them afterwards. The situation is more difficult in the case of the battery, because it is glued in order to avoid wiggling the relatively heavy component. However, they want to change that, making it easier to remove the power supply. In terms of further developments, a better display would be possible, but more powerful hardware (eg based on RDNA 3.0) does not seem likely at the moment.
In terms of Deck 2, the engineers also touched on the Steam console, of which they also want to assemble a second-generation version, but the exact details of this are not yet clear, and until Deck 2 is ready, there are no resources for the 2 console.
As for the software side, Valve, of course, does not stop developing. Here we can expect new features such as sharing of game-related performance profiles, support for older mobile games that are only optimized for touch, and regular audio mixer integration. The latter can be used to adjust the volume of running programs independently of each other.