Hardware usually first reduces in price because manufacturers start with a need to quickly recover the large R&D costs using a high profit margin, and at some point they break even and can start bringing the price down. And often manufacturing just does get cheaper as time goes on too. Game consoles are kinda special, as they are often sold at a loss from the start because they expect sales in games to eventuslly cover it all, so their pricing usually slowly trends down in hopes it attracts new owners that will then buy a bunch of games.

Valve doesn't do that with the Deck (they want the hardware division to be entirely self-sufficient), but they also set the margim to be really low right from the start to be competitive, so they had to increase the price to match current manufacturing costs or each Deck would lose the hardware division a lot of money.

Prices for consoles went up, too

That's my secret hope, since they already have the Frame on ARM. This would make the release of a separate ARM based Steam OS more likely and my tablet will be very thankful for that.

I’ve been using the ARM version on Rocknix and it’s amazing. The power efficiency while maintaining graphic quality is really surprising. I sure hope SteamDeck 2 is ARM. I’d be a little surprised if not.