Steam Frame's 20.9 Wh battery is glued in, and iFixit won't sell you a spare

Steam Frame's battery is a 20.9 Wh two-cell lithium-polymer pack, and it is glued in with what iFixit's teardown found to be old-school adhesive: no stretch-release tabs, no easy-peel wraps, no debondable adhesive. "We were able to get the battery out with a little isopropyl alcohol and gentle prying, but we'd much rather see a deliberate release mechanism," it says, and it will not be stocking spares: "We won't yet be selling Steam Frame batteries when parts go live in our store."

Steam Frame's strap, nose bridge and controller straps, as Valve shows them. iFixit says the foams and the nose bridge each come off independently. Image: Valve

That lands on the Frame's softest spot, because battery life was one of the two complaints that ran through the first Steam Frame reviews, alongside the price. The teardown was written by Elizabeth Chamberlain and published on September 23.

iFixit calls the fan the clearest miss

The cooling fan is "the Frame's clearest missed opportunity", iFixit says, because reaching it "takes us past the optics and through the dense internal assembly, disturbing far more hardware than we'd like for a replacement". Its point is that blowing dust out of a fan is ordinary hardware maintenance, and that a dying fan is something an owner will notice.

The controllers fare better. They take replaceable AA batteries, although iFixit found the thumbstick soldered to the board, so "changing it will require soldering work rather than simply unplugging a module".

Foams, nose bridge and lens stacks come off easily

Face foams, headrest foams and the nose bridge each come away independently. The lenses and displays ride on a rail for interpupillary distance, with the lens stacks held to that rail magnetically rather than screwed down.

Inside, iFixit found a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with 16GB of SK Hynix LPDDR5X, twelve infrared emitters for play-space tracking with six on each side, and two inward-facing IR cameras just above the nose bridge doing the eye tracking that drives foveated rendering. Storage is 256GB or 1TB, with microSD expansion up to 2TB, which iFixit likes because upgradeable storage keeps a device in use longer.

The displays are LCD rather than the micro-OLED panels many expected, which iFixit notes should keep display replacements cheaper.

The split helps. The optical and compute half "detaches from the headband, which includes the battery, speakers, and consumable foams", so the parts that wear out sit together, and the parts that break expensively sit elsewhere. It is the adhesive under the pack that undoes the good work.

Valve has been leaning into repairability in public. Its own Steam Machine repair guides went live on iFixit on September 22, with the same gap: guides, but nothing to buy. iFixit gave the Frame no repairability score, because it has no scorecard for VR headsets yet. What it published instead is a list of the parts you can swap, and one you cannot: the battery you will want first.