He was indeed joking, but there’s a lot of improvement for the second-gen Steam Deck.
VRR is a huge one. Just support VRR with zero additional changes and the Steam Deck would be improved immensely.
The screen, too. Switch to a LTPO OLED, and you add infinite contrast and save a ton of battery when not gaming (or not moving, inside a game). LTPO benefits are huge outside of games too, battery savings are really significant there.
Performance is a biggie. Gen 1 can basically play modern games at 720p with spatial upscaling and a 30fps cap without destroying its battery. The graphics look like absolute dogshit, but the screen is so small and you’re so happy to be playing Elden Ring on the bus that you don’t really care.
The device needs to be roughly twice as fast without using additional energy to give a solid 720p60 or 1080p30 experience. That won’t happen in gen 2, but maybe 3.
You can get some of that performance without destroying image quality by switching from the shittastic FSR1 to FSR2, which is vastly superior. FSR1 sucks ass, FSR2 doesn’t. That’s a software thing, though, not tied to hardware revisions. On the deck gen 1 you’ll still be stuck at 720p30, it’ll just look a whole lot better.