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Repairing the Steam Deck LCD Gets Much More Expensive as Official Battery Reaches $180
(www.eteknix.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Yeah, that's the confusing bit. We're told that the selected third party batteries are good quality, but I'm weary that they're all just being made in the same factory.
And by that I don't mean that I think the AliExpress battery is necessarily bad. I'm saying I think it's the same, but ifixit has found a way to gouge by suggesting that their third party battery is different.
Yeah, this feels like extreme price gouging. I generally like what iFixit does, their toolkits are great and I've bought Steam Deck parts in the past (a replacement fan when mine got noisy). However, if they're going to participate in price gouging I'm done with them. There's no reason a Steam Deck sized battery should ever be even close to $180, and given how numerous third party options are, there's zero reason to pay that price for an "official" one. It's a battery, it's as generic of a component as it gets. Sure, it has a charge controller, but so do the third party ones. It's a custom shape, but that's probably just two standard sized cells taped together. If the shape were a real problem the third party ones wouldn't be any cheaper.
A lot of the time the third party parts are made in the same factory on the same lines. Often their contracts are for X amount of product and Y quality. Only when you get to massive companies and products like Apple and the iPhone do you actually get third party factories producing copied parts.
Most are just the same factories producing extra product by running the lines for extra hours, at a faster speed, etc. and taking both the extra product and the product that barely failed the quality control for some reason but can be sold as B stock on the grey market. A lot of "counterfeit" products are legitimate in every way, just not authorized by the manufacturer.
Often the charge controller isn't even part of the battery. A BMS is but that is only a safety precaution against overcurrent or over/undercharge.
The charging itself, from the usb cable to the battery is usually done elsewhere.
Totally agree, and I'm also sad because iFixit otherwise has seemed to be pretty trustworthy. I'm definitely curious to see if some enthusiast out there has the new iFixit third party option to compare with the AliExpress one. I bet the label would be enough to determine if they're the identical product.
AliExpress is a pile of garbage but you can find decent things there if you know where to look. I've gotten quite some decent items from there.
Anyone and any shop can sell there ranging from good ones to scammers.
It's probably made in the same factory, but there is more QA in the chain (normally/I hope) and then the batteries have multiple middlemen taking a cut with IFixit adding their profit margin on top of every middlemen costs.