Update #1: Asus has confirmed that its own portable gaming PC, the ROG Ally, is real. This follows a very lengthy "joke" announced on April Fool's Day, in which Asus said that the ROG Ally was a "portable gaming PC" that would be used to play games on the go.

To put it bluntly, the ROG Ally is a portable gaming PC that Asus announced on April Fool's Day and confirmed was a joke. They then went on about it after the fact and now, two days later, have revealed that the actual April Fool's joke was true all along.

Basically, there is no such thing as a joke.

Update #2: There is specific information about what is driving ROG Ally (not a lie).

Dave2D (opens in new tab) has more details, confirming that inside the ROG Ally is a custom AMD SoC manufactured on TSMC's 4nm process node, with a Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 GPU, currently compatible with the latest processors and graphics cards available as discrete desktop parts.

It is likely to be a more powerful processor than the one in the Steam Deck. It has more pixels than the Steam Deck's 800p screen, and Ally runs faster at up to 120Hz; whether the 4nm AMD silicon can take full advantage of this resolution and refresh rate remains to be seen, but games where it can should provide a smoother experience.

According to Dave2D, the even better news is that the Ally is quite quiet in operation. In their tests, the Ally was about 20db under load, while the Steam Deck was 37db.

The device runs Windows 11, but there are custom Asus apps, including a game launcher, that allow the handheld system to be tweaked on the fly. Experience with other Windows-powered handhelds is that they are not as sophisticated as Valve's Linux SteamOS on the Steam Deck, so be aware of that. Some online games, such as Destiny, will not work on the Steam Deck, so at least Windows is less restricted in the games it can play.

Ideally, Asus would develop its own launcher app, which would eliminate the need for frequent access to the Windows desktop.

The genuinely exciting part of the ROG Ally is that it can connect to Asus' external GPU enclosure, which uses its own connection; if the GPU enclosure can run all other display outputs, then you can dock the device at home and play high-resolution, loaded This could be an appropriate way to dock the device at home and play high-resolution, high-load games.

The key piece of information we are missing right now is price. The device looks good, but the draw of the Steam Deck is its price, which is quite low for a gaming PC; Asus told Dave2D that the price "will be very competitive," but we don't know much more than that.

Hopefully the price will really be competitive and the software will be a smooth experience. Despite the erratic announcement, it looks like a really decent handheld PC.

Original article Most of the time, I can spot a fake that a PC hardware manufacturer spits out on April Fool's Day. I don't take any hardware manufacturer's press releases or tweets at face value on this day, just in case. But sometimes a fake product created out of a sense of obligation to a terribly unpleasant day is plausible enough to exist. I mean, there are whole series of perfume-sprayed graphics cards (opens in new tab) that are all too real.

Some April Fool's joke products are so lifelike that it's hard to tell if they are meant to be a joke or even an attempt to promote the idea to the general public; Corsair's fidget spinner keycap (opens in new tab) is a real Is it a strange idea?

But we are talking about Asus' supposed new handheld gaming PC, the ROG Ally. It's not a joke product, it's simply not funny, but it was announced on April 1. Ha. Ha

On April 1, ROG accounts around the world tweeted about the new ROG Ally (opens in new tab). There are actual gaming videos, mockups, and even professionally filmed videos with the claim that it will have a custom AMD APU. The narration is a bit overdone and the acting sometimes, but if you watch the video in isolation (it's on YouTube without any mention of April Fool's Day beyond the date it was uploaded) you could easily be fooled into thinking this is a very real product.

It's the kind of portable gaming PC you'd dream of if someone said, "Steam Deck (opens in new tab) but make it ROG.

It's big, it's flashy, and the promotional shots make it look very real. In other words, it is incredibly plausible, given the success of the Steam Deck and the many similar gaming handhelds on the market today.

But it was announced on April 1, and no company is likely to release an actual product on April 1.

Well, you would think so, and indeed they did, and according to Shawn Yen, head of product management at ROG, it was a bogus product after all. They posted a link to a promotional video for ROG Ally on LinkedIn, saying, "Happy April Fool's Day...ROG Ally (a lie)."

They made you look so bad with this product you might really want. You guys are definitely being duped. Suck it up to be so easily fooled by a promotional trailer that looks perfectly legit for a perfectly credible product.

But what if it is real?

I say this because the joke didn't stop on April 1. In the British Isles, where I live, this is tantamount to a crime -- if you don't stop April Fool's Day by 12 p.m. on April 1, you deserve to go to jail.

However, the ROG account was still tweeting about ROG Ally on April 2, and the ROG Japan account made it clear that it was no longer April 1 when it tweeted again about the handheld device, and further that, in fact, the real joke was that the product was fake not that the product was fake, but that it suggested the product was in fact real. Ugh.

Incidentally, it says "Today is 4/2," citing a secondary tweet from ROG Ally on April 2, implying that the joke was off and the announcement was real.

There is also a Best Buy landing page (opens in new tab) where you can register your interest in the product. Such a thing would really be too much of a joke. Now, against my better judgment, I can only assume that this actually exists and is nothing more than a terrible ploy to generate buzz ahead of the launch.

You have succeeded in getting people to talk about it.

After all, this is either a terrible prolonged attempt at an April Fool's joke or the absolute worst way to launch a new product.

I sent an email to Asus, trying to clarify what was going on and whether they had announced a new product. April Fool's Day really sucks.