The initial buy in for the steam deck is so much cheaper. It has everything you need in a package: oled screen, portable, better sales, mods, repairable and free multiplayer.
Maybe I'm too Canadian to understand but where on earth are you able to build a decent gaming PC able to play the latest AAA games on high graphics for $700?
No really, please tell me. I want to upgrade my PC.
Edit: For everyone trying to explain it to me.
There's more to a PC than a CPU and GPU. Those of you giving me only those 2 that make up more than half of the $700 are kind of reinforcing my point.
The key thing here is running AAA games on high settings using this budget. You can't really do that.
Steam Deck all the way. Also Sony's been shit since at least the 2011 hack.
You can also get PC games from all kinds of sources and sales that ultimately are far cheaper than the pithy Playstation sales. It greatly offsets costs over time.
You also have far more backwards compatibility and flexibility especially to do things with controller profiles and mods, etc.
Why would I buy a digital only console for 700 usd? My pc is digital only. The only reason I even buy consoles is physical games, but Sony wants to stop giving that option.
The worst part of this for me is that I remember when you could build a PC with better specs than a console for the same price. Now we're coming back full circle to where that might be possible again, but graphics cards never truly came down from their inflated crypto mining prices. So that means consoles are just getting more expensive and everybody is losing.