Ayaneo’s new Ryzen handheld costs $4,300. What are we doing here? | usagoldmines.com

The Steam Deck is successful for a lot of reasons: tight integration with Steam (PC gaming’s de facto home), excellent control options, great support. But I’d argue what really let it spawn a new device market almost from scratch was its low price of $400 to start. So, with all due respect, Ayaneo, what the hell are you thinking making a handheld that costs more than a used Ford Focus?

Meet the Ayaneo Next 2. It’s a handheld from a company that’s well known for them. In fact, Ayaneo’s first model predated the Steam Deck by a few months, competing with devices like GPD’s mini notebooks. This new model is similar to lots of other handhelds, with specs like a 9-inch OLED screen, adjustable sticks, Hall effect triggers, etc. The big body lets it hold a massive 116-watt-hour battery (technically illegal on most commercial flights), which is needed to power a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, not to mention the dual-fan cooling system.

Check out the promo video below. (Skip the first two minutes of the video below. It’s the kind of fluff that would make an Apple keynote look well-paced. Plus, “An unimaginable masterpiece in your palms” is a line that Groucho Marx would have died to receive as a setup.)

You can find most of this stuff in handhelds in the $1,000 to $1,500 range, which already boggles my budget-focused brain. No, I suspect it’s the RAM and storage that are sending the retail prices into the stratosphere, just like everywhere else. The base model uses 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, along with a downgraded AI 385 CPU, with an expected price of $2,000 when it arrives in June 2026. You can bump it up to the highest possible processor and 64GB of RAM for $2,700. With 128GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, you get a retail price of $4,299. Good friggin’ God.

You can get a “discount” on these prices by pre-ordering on Indiegogo, as Windows Central notes. And yes, while Indiegogo projects don’t necessarily inspire a lot of confidence, Ayaneo has delivered many handhelds this way. If you have more money than sense a desire for a handheld that costs more than the average high-end gaming laptop, you can get that top configuration for $3,500.

In defense of this design, AMD’s Ryzen AI Max chips have the capacity to share system memory with the integrated graphics, which means all that RAM is a little more useful than on a standard gaming desktop. (See devices like the Framework Desktop for context.) But that functionality is intended more for “AI” development functionality than gaming—we’re still talking about integrated graphics here. Even with 16-core power, the 8060S graphics are roughly equivalent to a mid-range Radeon card.

Ayaneo isn’t the first company to cram these chips into a handheld form factor. Competitor GPD made a design with the AI Max+ 395 (the GPD Win 5) and its solution to the heft issue was to separate the battery entirely. With a similar 64GB of RAM and an even bigger 4TB SSD, that device is currently going for “just” $3,400 or so.

I know there are people out there who will pay a premium for a more powerful handheld. If there weren’t, Ayaneo and co. wouldn’t keep making them. But I really cannot wrap my head around this.