Hi, hello, and welcome to a new edition of the overkill digest newsletter!
I've been observing the tech industry for about 18 years. I started my first blog when I was 16 or 17 (I don't remember anymore). It was a German-speaking Apple blog, back when Apple was still mostly "the iPod company", and the iPhone was barely a year old. I did this for several years, and it motivated me to get into journalism.
Much later, I launched overkill as a Steam Deck and handheld blog first, and later expanded it into this personal tech and gaming blog you are reading right now. In between, I also dabbled with tech writing on my personal website. For a long time, tech and gaming has been a sort of escapism, a nerdy niche and hobby for me. I spent a lot of my downtime watching YouTube videos, reading blogs, perusing forums (and later Discord servers), and playing with new technology. I mean, I still do that.
But for a while now, and especially these past 12 months, I've become tired of what the tech world has to offer.
Tech runs the world now. (The 7 richest people on earth are tech bros entrepreneurs.) It is everywhere. Most everything feels like it's tech now. That, per se, is not something that bothers me, but it's what the tech world deems "interesting" that annoys me.
I just don't give a fuck about so much of what's happening. I don't care about crypto or NFTs. I don't care about the metaverse, or how social media is changing content creation. And I particularly don't care about the latest tech rage, AI.
If I watch the rage that is OpenClaw and I see all these people hyping up what is essentially a security risk, I can't help but wonder if I am losing my mind. In fact, these people are losing their minds. I saw people claiming AI had more impact than the discovery of fire, and I don't even know how to react to that.
I don't reject AI. There are use-cases that are truly helpful. I have two subscriptions (Gemini and OpenAI, although the latter one expires this year and I don't see myself renewing). But it's the whole community around it that is so unbearable. EVERYTHING is revolutionary and will change the world.
And these people are everywhere. All websites and tech blogs write about it too. I guess it leads to clicks and clicks bring advertising money. Everyone is jumping on the AI-hype on YouTube, too. It's even omnipresent on social media (one of the several reasons I got off this month). You just can't escape it.
And that tires me out. I could try to mute and block all of it, and religiously unfollow anyone who talks about it (I'm aware I would have to unfollow myself here too, with this email). But then you hear that because of the AI-rage, we can't afford our gaming PCs anymore, or that Valve struggles with the Steam Machine, or that devs will use AI to revolutionize their game development, or that the company you work for tries to stuff AI down your throat as if they were trying to make some AI Foie Gras out of your liver.
Thankfully, there is still a counterculture. I don't think it's a coincidence that seemingly out of the blue the interest in Linux has grown as much as it did these past few months. Or that self-hosting has gained in popularity.
I'd love to lean deeper in these communities. But still, all the rest is omnipresent, making it difficult to dance around all of it.
I don't yet know what this truly means for myself. For now, I will still regularly check my different feeds every day, because it's how I create this website, after all I check my RSS feeds every day, sometimes several times per day and collect links for this newsletter. And normally, I comment on them throughout the week, except when I have a crazy busy IRL week like this one.
But I can't say how long I'm able to do that before I burn out.
That said, let's get to this week's (short) collection of news: (what a segue!)
📬 Weekly Digest
Sony State of Play Feb. 2026: All the news, trailers, and reveals.
This was a good event. My personal highlights are that Indie God of War, the upcoming John Wick game starring Keanu Reeves, and the Control Resonant gameplay trailer. (And there was much more.)
Steam Deck completely out of stock in the US, Canada and Asia.
Liam:
It's been like it for a few days now, which is the first time this has happened in quite some time since the original rush after release. Valve said previously once the 256GB LCD model went out of stock they wouldn't be making any more, so we already expected that. But with the OLED also out of stock, that's perhaps a tiny bit alarming.
In Europe, the 512 GB OLED is also out of stock, only the 1TB version is available.
At this point, I would not be surprised if Valve decided to not release any new hardware anytime soon after all.
Ayaneo’s new Windows handheld will cost up to $4,299 with maxed out specs.
Andrew Liszewski:
Pricing starts at $1,999 for a version of the Next 2 with a Ryzen AI Max 385 processor with integrated Radeon 8050S graphics, 32GB of memory, and 1TB of SSD storage. But since Ayaneo is using Indiegogo for preorders, early bird pricing brings it down to $1,799 for a limited time. Maxing out the Next 2’s specs will cost you $4,299 (or $3,499 with early bird discounts) but you’ll get the same AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor as found in the GPD Win 5 with a Radeon 8060S iGPU, 128GB of memory, and 2TB of storage.
That APU is a beast. I still have my review unit of the ROG Flow Z13 lying here, and I keep being surprised by how well it just runs games. But in a handheld, it'll just burn through battery life. I expect the Next 2 to primarily be a handheld you use plugged in. Although, that price is too much for a handheld, no matter how you see it.
Talking of AYANEO, they also launched the KONKR FIT with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 or 470.
The $999 starting price is for a model with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Strix Point processor, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. Customers can pay $1299 for a model with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 Gorgon Point processor, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.
This one confuses me the most, because I thought the KONKR brand was AYANEO's budget line. But it looks like the AI component shortage means that there is no budget line-up anymore.
Ok, that's all. Thanks for reading!
See you,
Kevin