That’s not due to new hardware, battery life is a conscious decision from design/marketing teams. Newer hardware, if it’s worth anything at all, can accomplish more operations at the same TDP as the previous generation. Or more accurately, new hw should always have better performance per watt than older hw (*generally. Of course there are always hardware architecture differences that can dramatically affect performance of very specific scenarios for better and worse, but I’m talking about on-average).

But that doesn’t stop hw manufacturers from bumping up the TDP recommendations to sell their latest chips (why new nvidia GPUs always suck another 100W of power each gen), and it doesn’t stop OEMs from using a higher TDP limit to sell the performance of their handheld (why newer handhelds seem to have worse battery life).

The team that designs a new handheld could use the newer compute hw with the same battery capacity and:

• the same TDP limit, resulting in a marginal increase to performance at the same battery life
• a lower TDP limit, resulting in the same performance in higher battery life

but they often determine neither of those will sell units as well as using a slightly higher TDP limit for higher performance review numbers at the cost of battery life.

This is why I like that SteamOS has a deliberately configurable TDP limit in the flyout menu, per-title! This gives the player manual control over what they consider important rather than leaving it up to a marketing team or some buggy power limit heuristics. Just one more reason why I’m excited to see wider adoption of SteamOS.