iFixit recently published its teardown of the Valve Steam Frame, revealing the device's internals and praising Valve's "thoughtful design" for its ease-of-repair and disassembly. The Steam Frame mostly comes apart with screws and snaps that require only mild pressure, but Shahram Mokhtari, the presenter and iFixit's lead teardown tech, bemoans that the Frame's battery is glued to the inside of the housing instead of using easy-to-remove fasteners. With the exception of the battery removal, the only other major complaint is that the internal fan and heatsink module are not individually serviceable.

Other design touches, like the magnetically attached lens assemblies and more affordable IPS displays, also received praise during the teardown. The rest of the compute module comes apart pretty uneventfully, aside from some confusion with the cooling assembly and an abundance of cables running over the motherboard. Despite the slight complications with the motherboard cable routing, iFixit argues that the design is solid, because most repairs would not need that level of disassembly, so burying that complexity there is the correct decision.

iFixit also confirms that it will sell Steam Frame spares and publish repair guides, the same way it has with the Steam Deck and now the Steam Machine. iFixit did not publish a teardown of the Steam Frame controllers alongside the Frame itself, but Mokhtari did analyze some Lumafield CT scans of the controllers instead. He points out that the controller uses a full-size TMR joystick, adding that it should be more resistant to wear as a result, but also lamenting that the TMR stick is soldered in, which will make repair difficult.