The exact quote:
It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence. We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about and we’re working on.
Intel is claiming that with the upcoming Arrow Lake series of CPUs will seriously cut down the power budget. Important clarifications on that, the TDP of Arrow Lake is still around 150W TDP but that doesn’t mean it’ll pull the full 150W all the time, and wait for third-party benchmarks before believing anything they say. Still if what they’re claiming is half true mobile devices could be getting a huge boon.
It doesn’t always scale down though. There’s always an efficiency curve so we really can’t speculate. I agree, we have to wait and see.