I thought the Steam Deck was plenty portable, but as it turns out, some people feel that it's not portable enough. To help cut it down to size, someone has rebuilt their Steam Deck without the screen or the controller, resulting in just a case with the Deck hardware in and not much else. The end result was a little brick-like device, so it was suitably crowned the Steam Brick.

The Steam Brick is a Steam Deck reduced to its essentials

As developed by crastinator-pro on GitHub (thanks, Hackaday!), the Steam Brick is what happens if you take a Steam Deck, rip out its innards, and stuff them in a box. The end result is, well, a brick that can play games, which isn't too unlike a regular console.

So, that's neat and all, but...why? Well, turns out that the creator had their reasons:

The Steam Deck has been a game changer for travel, but I found myself leaving it behind more often than not, as it wouldn’t fit in my backpack, took up a huge amount of carry-on space, and was a hassle to bring down from the overhead compartment when I wanted to use it. When I did use the Deck, it was either plugged in to AR Glasses (XReal Air 2 Pro) or plugged in to a TV. So, I got to thinking: it could be so much smaller and lighter without the build in controller and screen, but that would be ridiculous, right? …right?

If you want to see how it was done, head over to the GitHub page to see the process. As crastinator-pro describes it, the GitHub page is less of a comprehensive guide and more of a "here's how I did it" showcase. However, if you're mad enough to follow in their footsteps, it should be enough to give you some inspiration on what can and can't be done.