Another Steam Deck alternative? GPD WinMax 2

Welcome to my world as my group is often the truth teller/refuter of what sales told a customer… :grin:

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I will say I am highly, highly tempted to get one if I bought solely based on advertised technical merits, but other factors play in that hit me with a cool splash of reality. My other issue is their well-known history of absentee and sluggish warranty support. AYA Neo is about the only Chinese brand that I would consider if I wanted to chance it. See the comments here to this post (link: Reddit - Dive into anything). Here a customer praised GPD for taking only one month after him sending messages to which others rightly point out that is not a positive experience in any way, shape, or form. However, that customer support exchange is the exception from the norm as this post (link: Reddit - Dive into anything) and numerous more show. This comment sums it up nicely: “Most posts I’ve seen have stated either folks receive parts to do repairs themselves, or they send the device to GPD and never see it again.” (A direct reply to that comment backs up that claim, saying: “They sent me a screen to repair it by myself and told me to use a heat machine to remove the glue on my old ones i dont think im going to try that lol.”) This lackluster support is another reason why I refrain from recommending them.

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I will underscore why I like AYA Neo is because their CEO Arther Zhang personally responds to inquiries and concerns. He is a highly capable communicator who is competent and fluent–in fact, better than many native English-speaking companies I have had the pleasure of dealing with. I am still giving them a little more time to mature as a company before I commit to a purchase, but I can tell already that he has a solid grasp on their long-term corporate brand strategy. GPD has the key advantage of being in the market for much longer, but they are grossly lacking in marketing and customer support. Maybe they will clean up their act eventually, though.


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That’s what I imagined regarding support. Although up to a certain point I do appreciate it if a company offers me the possibility of doing repairs up to a certain level myself, e.g. replacing a hard drive or even a full screen module I guess I’d be fine with, especially if it means I don’t have to send the device away. Of course, it’s a bit different when heatguns come into play…

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That’s fascinating to me. Obviously they are responding very differently to a semi large corporation versus individuals consumers. Like I said in my first post, our limited experience with them has been positive. But perhaps they were just trying to suck up to us to get our business???

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That’s very possible. I can only guess, but they may be courting you guys as an official US distributor. GPD works through DroiX in the UK who rebrands GPD products and handles warranty support directly there. That’s, by the way, the only case I would recommend a GPD product: if you live in the EU, DroiX is a safe bet for a GPD product though there is a considerable markup with the middleman cut factored in. Of course, on the flip side, it may be that if GPD sends you a shipment of defective units which happens to have a high failure rate, you may bear the entirety of the fiscally responsible for pulling the inevitable warranty replacements out of your own inventory with no recourse for compensation for all the defective units they sent you according to the terms they established.

It’s only more recently that these Chinese OEMs have had rare or unique features as their main selling point. It has mostly been and still mostly is about how cheap their products are (either compared to the competition or for their features).

It’s no surprise that this also comes with very little support. That’s a lot of where they are getting the savings from. That does mean that they can be ‘brought up to standard’ by a middleman. The cost just increases as a result. I doubt the actual profit from the middlemen is that much; they get their sales by being the few places to get such devices.

It is more frustrating these days as these Chinese OEMs are now the only place to get some devices that fill some niches. The more reputable companies seem increasingly less inclined to experiment with products.

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Yes, exactly! For some reason since the netbook days all major companies have abandoned the form factor of 10 inch (or thereabouts) clamshells (or convertibles). Even for tablets, what your can get most readily are surface-sized clones, and then there’s the Surface Go.
I’m sure they have their reasons, but I’ve been longing in vain for a 10 inch sized ThinkPad with at least moderately powerful hardware (Lenovo used to have this 11 inch line, but they are massive by today’s standards and tend to have underwhelming specs being aimed mostly at schools).
Currently, GPD and onenetbook are the only real options in that space as far as I know. Interestingly, they also seem to shift away from the clamshell form factor in favour of steam-deck-like slates, which again aren’t really an option if you want to have a lapable device that you can write papers on.

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Another confirmation that the Ryzen 7 6800U is the better gaming choice:

… and it won’t be as much of a watt-guzzling space heater, either. :vb-agree:

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