AYANEO Suspends NEXT 2 Pre Orders as Storage Costs Spiral Beyond Its Planned Pricing
AYANEO has temporarily suspended pre orders for its flagship NEXT 2 handheld, and the reason is simple but brutal: storage costs have climbed so sharply that the company says the device is no longer sustainable to sell at its current price. In an official update posted on Indiegogo, AYANEO said the cost of producing the handheld has moved far beyond the announced selling price after a fresh surge in storage procurement costs following the Chinese New Year.
According to AYANEO, storage prices were already unusually high when the company launched the NEXT 2 campaign, but management still chose to move forward because fans had been waiting for the handheld and the team believed pricing might be nearing its peak. That expectation did not hold. AYANEO says suppliers later came back with updated pricing showing storage costs had risen several times higher than before the holiday, pushing the overall product cost far above the existing MSRP. The company says it has now removed the handheld from its sales channels and paused new pre orders, though it will still honor all existing Indiegogo orders.
That makes this more than a routine preorder adjustment. AYANEO is effectively saying that the original economics behind the NEXT 2 have broken down. The Verge reports that the company described continued sales as “no longer sustainable,” while Notebookcheck says AYANEO framed the situation as one where the total cost of the handheld had approached nearly double what it originally expected in the worst case. That does not necessarily mean the final public price would have doubled immediately, but it shows just how badly the storage side of the bill of materials has drifted.
The NEXT 2 was announced as one of AYANEO’s most premium handhelds yet, built around AMD’s Ryzen AI Max family and positioned well above mass market handheld pricing. The campaign page listed configurations starting around 1,799 dollars for the 32 GB and 1 TB Ryzen AI Max 385 model, while higher end versions stretched far beyond that. At those price points, the hardware was already targeting enthusiasts rather than the broader portable gaming crowd. A major storage cost shock on top of that clearly pushed the device into territory AYANEO no longer felt comfortable selling into.
What makes this especially notable is that AYANEO is not canceling the handheld outright. The company says the suspension is temporary and leaves open the possibility of resuming sales if storage prices return to a more reasonable level. That distinction matters because it suggests AYANEO still believes in the product and still intends to fulfill the roadmap, but simply cannot absorb the current component pricing without creating an unsustainable loss structure.
From a wider market perspective, the story is another sign that handheld PC vendors remain highly exposed to supply chain volatility, especially when they operate at lower scale than the biggest notebook and console players. A premium niche device like the NEXT 2 has less room to hide component shocks, particularly when those shocks hit SSD and memory pricing at the same time. AYANEO may be the company making the most visible move here, but the underlying pressure is not unique to one brand. This last point is an inference based on the company’s explanation and the current component market context.
For now, the main takeaway is clear. AYANEO has not killed the NEXT 2, but it has admitted that the current pricing model no longer works. Existing backers are still getting their units, new orders are frozen, and the future of broader sales now depends on whether storage costs cool down enough for the handheld to make business sense again.
Do you think handheld makers can keep pushing premium Windows devices at these prices, or is the market finally hitting a point where component costs are starting to break the model?
