Asus ROG Ally was first teased on 1st April and since then Asus has shared a lot about the product’s performance except for pricing. However, today we have the official leaked pricing for this new gaming handheld console.
You might know already that the ROG Ally will be available in two different editions. One is the Z1 extreme that features a custom 8-core APU with RDNA 3 based 780M and the other one is the non-Z1 extreme featuring a 6-core APU and a cut-down iGPU with only 4 compute units.
Previously some assumed that Asus will be launching the non-Extreme edition at $650 but the new leak just confirmed that it is the Z1 Extreme edition instead. As leaked by Twitter user Khumail Thakur and confirmed by The Verge, the console was listed on BestBuy which is the official Asus partner for this console launch. And as you can see here it will cost $50 more than the rumored pricing but has impressive specs like 16GB LPDDR5 memory and 512GB NVME SSD storage.
Best Buy product page leaked the price of the Asus ROG Ally. It will be priced at $699 dollars for the 16GB/512GB variant. pic.twitter.com/CbfERTkGT4
— Khumail Thakur (@wickedkhumz) April 27, 2023
For comparison, it is just $50 more expensive than the Steam Deck with the same memory and storage capacity but now you get a significantly faster console that is comparable to PS4 Pro, has a superior display, and various other features that outperform the Steam Deck.
Right now the page has been removed from BestBuy but if this is the true pricing of this handheld then almost every handheld console including Steam Deck may not live for that long.
On the other hand, the non-Z1 Extreme edition is reportedly priced at $599 according to The Verge. This edition is significantly slower than the Z1 Extreme and will also come with a cut-off storage of 256GB.
Considering how inferior the Non-Z1 Extreme is, many are skeptical about buying such a console as a 100 bucks more on the Z1 Extreme edition could be much more worth the money.
It is expected that ROG Ally will hit the market in the second half of this year and will be available in North America before reaching other parts of the world.
