We may see a Steam Deck refresh with WiFi 6E

While we know that Valve have said repeatedly not to expect a faster Steam Deck 2 any time soon, it appears they may still be doing some kind of refreshed Steam Deck.

This isn't all that surprising though as Valve have been doing a number of tweaks to the internals of the Steam Deck since the original release. We've seen the different fans with one having that annoying high-pitched whine, different types of SSDs, and even adjustments to the internals.

Now as noted on X by Brad Lynch, Valve appears to have gone through approvals for a change to the WiFi chip inside the Steam Deck with one that supports WiFi 6E with Dual Band Simultaneous (DBS) and Bluetooth 5.2. Here's two of the images mentioned:

Various documents about this can be quite easily found via search engines, like this that lists plenty including the first shot above taken from this document.

It will be interesting to see what happens here. There's so many ways that Valve could refresh the Steam Deck, without changing the main performance profile with the APU that would be worth upgrading. Imagine a better WiFi chip, a better screen, better battery, updated thermals and more — so many areas Valve could improve on for a mid-gen refresh that would be worth picking up.

Eventually we should find out what Galileo and Sephiroth are that was leaked before. Perhaps it's related to this? What do you think Valve are doing?