It’s wild reading comments like these, because I thought they made it painfully obvious. All the headlines from that interview clearly delineated that they were talking about a “faster Steam Deck” aka a Steam Deck 2 and not a hardware refresh. Like here’s a Verge article from September

“changing the performance level is not something we are taking lightly… I don’t anticipate such a leap to be possible in the next couple of years”

All that said, Valve might totally still have a Steam Deck refresh in the works that doesn’t change the performance floor. There’s a rich history of console manufacturers releasing smaller, lighter, and more power efficient versions of the same hardware…