Hi. Let’s talk about how the sentence “the joycon are expensive” turns into “to say that $80 is not expensive”.
I give you the floor to kickstart this roundtable on why online conversation sucks and everybody is a complete dick when you talk to them on the Internet.
Fundamentally true of everything with a battery. For old Nintendo devices that just… hold on to that charge forever I also strongly recommend pulling them out of mothballs every year or six months and giving them a full charge cycle, just in case. Gives you a reason to revisit old games, while you’re at it.
I wanna say they did the foam thing on Switch 1 (never needed to replace it, so I’m not positive, speaking from memory), but these things are typically popular enough you get aftermarket replacements specifically built to fit, so I’m not too worried about getting a replacement down the line, even with Nintendo not providing the requried documentation (but seriously, they have to for legal reasons, so they better get to it).
I’m more concerned about getting to the thing in the first place on this one. Plus the battery life is worse, so there’s conceivable a market for larger capacity replacements.
This conversation reminds me I need to swap a suspicious battery on an old Samsung S10 I had in storage and I’m NOT looking forward to dealing with that, either. Maybe I’ll just dunk it in alcohol and hope for the best…
You’d think, but I have Nintendo handhelds from the 2000s that still hold a charge fine, and so does my launch Switch 1, which is about a decade old.
The Switch 2 is the first one of these they ship with a battery care charge mode, too, which is interesting. I think as they abandon their old single-threaded, no-multitasking design, for a more mobile-like architecture they’re also having to make similar adjustments to their battery management, so it’ll be interesting to see if the Switch 2 battery struggles with degradation more than older devices. It sure is more power hungry, and it does get hotter so you’d expect more charge cycles per year and less durability. It’s going to be an open question for a while.
Still not the worst battery health in a Nintendo product, no matter what happens. That’ll always be the WiiU controller. That sytem laster just a couple of years and I still had to replace the battery for an aftermarket one and ended up using it plugged in anyway.
Well, the sticker is in the body of the thing. I get why they wanted to color code the controller slots here, you can definitely insert the things backwards, but the sticker in question is at the bottom of the slot to connect the controller, so getting in there is going to be a pain. The teardown guide uses heat to soften the adhesive, glossing over that challenge, but I imagine the average home user has a much harder time accessing that. I predict most refurbished or sold-for-parts Switch 2s will either have the stickers torn to reach the screws directly or a bunch of heat damage from people trying to use heat guns incorrectly.
We’ll see how that goes.
It mostly feels like Nintendo just didn’t consider anybody having to open these as part of the design process at all. Which they never do.
Still not the most challenging Nintendo repair I’ve seen (I don’t wish reinstalling the ribbon cable through the DS/3DS hinge on my worst enemy), but they’re clearly not moving towards more repairable hardware even in areas where they are supposed to by regulations.
I mean, it’s not a car. The joycon are expensive, but not THAT expensive. Still, they absolutely had to provide replacements to stick issues (which they did, to their credit).
It’s extra important on this run, because the new ones are even more expensive. They better last.
Also, I’m writing responses to things people say, not excuses. Companies aren’t football teams, I don’t need to root for or against any of them.
I don’t think I am. They had a significant isue with joycon drift. I do think some of it was overreported, in that a big issue with joycons is that they have absolutely garbage-tier connectivity, which can also manifest as the stick being “stuck” as the receiver keeps the last direction held to mask intermittent connectivity. But even with that, the sticks were prone to physical issues, at least in the earlier runs. It’s unclear how well newer sticks hold up in comparison.
But that is perhaps the biggest technical issue Nintendo has ever shipped, and their handhelds have been knwon for being insanely rugged since the original Game Boy. The Switch is perhaps the most prone to cosmetic issues, but it’s still a remarkably solid little tablet. It breaks under extreme abuse, just like the DS ended up with torn hinges and scratched plastic screens, but it’s nowhere near fragile. It’s a toy built for kids, so it’s built for more physical abuse than your average phone. That’s not a defense of Nintendo, it’s a very conscious decision they’ve made as an industrial design approach and a business model. It’s not good or bad in itself.
You may want to have a conversation with Nobody, I don’t think he got the memo.
Regardless, the point is Apple gets more of a pass. If I say “nobody actually expects privacy from Microsoft” that’s undeniably true, but hardly works as an excuse, does it?
Oh, they love to chew each other up.
But, you know, it’s in that left-of-centre, obnoxious-software-engineer way where they all think they have the right answer to whatever the issue is, they’re going to save the world and make Linux the One OS and everybody else is an idiot. That doesn’t count.
No, the main unit didn’t break and need repair beyond cosmetic scuffs. The joycons cycled through the console’s lifetime, which is also true of my Xbox (had an Elite controller die on me, that one hurt) and the PS4 (I don’t think I have a single DS4 left without a broken usb port).
Accessories are accessories, but the console still works to this day.
I’ve been around since MS-DOS 3, let me put that out there.
Also, a corporation isn’t a person where I’m from. You guys can sort your garbage legal system in your own time. (alright, so it’s a juridical person, which is a collective form of personhood where you can hold some rights, but you definitely do NOT have a physical person’s rights and you CERTAINLY don’t have an actual personality).
So besides repeating common tropes of online commentariat, which are by and large memes more than arguments, I’d point out that it’s not just that they aren’t the worst offenders, it’s that the conversation is about why they get that exact set of tropes waved in every conversation where other companies that do those same things do not.
The example I’m using is Apple, just because they’ve deployed the closest example to this, but they work because… well, you didn’t list them.
You seem to think that this is about being “for” or “against” companies. This is about why people would think it’s one or the other, and why they assign different attributes to corporations that largely operate in similar ways.
I think there’s something to the idea that Apple walls its garden so well people outside the wall don’t care about what happens inside it even when they disagree with it on principle.
I think you’re underplaying how big the garden is, though. You are thinking about this just in terms of PC OSs, but that’s not where Apple’s biggest presence is.
It’s a centralized search that can dig through your activity cross-platform and parses it through a centralized AI. Whether the data is stored in a log or as screenshots is a difference, but not as big of a difference as people make it out to be. It just feels intuitively weirder because one is humanly readable and the other one isn’t.
To be fair, that’s my takeaway from a lot of AI backlash. A whole bunch of it is people finally getting an intuitive grasp on activities that big data has been doing for years or decades and it finally clicking into shock because they can anthropomorphise the inputs and outputs better.
No wonder the techbros have lost their intuititon for what will trigger backlash. In many cases they’ve been doing far worse than those things with zero awareness or pushback.
Corporations aren’t people. Brands aren’t people.
I feel like in these online conversations where everybody is mostly just viscerally reacting to a headline people forget that a lot, and that worries me about as much as the underlying subjects of conversation.
I’ll be honest, I’m about as exhausted with both sides of that argument. I use both Linux and Windows daily and I have zero patience for people parading out this type of train of thought. I care about what works and, for obvious reasons, I’d much prefer if the effective default was free and open source, but the “We root against Windows because it was mean to us” thing is a borderline non-sequitur as far as I’m concerned.
I do think you have a point about how Apple users tend to live with Apple choices while everybody else mostly ignores them. I think this manifests in less of a taking sides thing. Linux activists definitely root against Windows, sometimes more than they root for Linux, and they certainly don’t put the same amount of energy on Apple hostility.
I think this is wider than that, though. Linux and Apple users aren’t nearly as focused on their own quirks and foibles, but everybody loves to dunk on MS. Not that I don’t, necessarily, but sometimes the difference in attitude jumps at me.
It’s not just them, either. There’s a subset of companies, like Epic or Mozilla that get this a lot. It’s more so in gaming circles (EA! Ubisoft! Activision!) but not just there.
I owned a Switch 1, and it certainly was the Nintendo console I touched up the most. I replaced the back panel once before I got a Lite and then an OLED.
I will say given how much I took that thing on the road and the beatings it took I never found the issues unreasonable and I only ever had to fix cosmetic damage (joycons aside). I’ve seen Switches get a TON of usage, too.
It’s not Nintendo’s most rugged console, but it’s certainly not a “fragile little thing” as I would define it.
Let me put it this way, I’d much rather fix a broken Steam Deck, but I was way less worried about breaking a Switch.
No, it’s an argumentative take that underplays the issues with Apple’s proposed implementation and overplays the issues with MS’s.
Apple’s semantic search stores what you do inside an app (via an API) and they offer a feature that records everything you do and feeds it to an AI.
MS’s Recall was on their insider program, and then only for a subset of their devices, so not so much “stealthed” as up for testing. They always made the same on-device promises (and since the relaunch they also have encryption for the data). I don’t like either implementation, but I don’t think the discrepancy in reaction matches the discrepancy in implementation.
Note that it’s not a MS vs Apple thing. Chrome and Pixel phones have or are planning some Recall-adjacent features, too, that nobody ever brings up.
I’m not interested in taking sides or having an argument about it, I’m calling out how atrocious MS’s PR is and how surprisingly not atrocious Apple’s is. I’d argue the Pixel brand and Samsung in general also get WAY too much of a pass.
I’m curious as to why. I mean, I know why, it’s because MS sucks at managing their image and always have. I’m curious as to why they don’t drag everybody else down with them. I genuinely thought for a moment Recall would be the death of onboard AI features looking over your shoulder, but it clearly wasn’t. Apple’s slow rollout seems to have much more to do with them being incapable of a good implementation with the tech that is available and much less with them having an image issue in this area.
Also, is Recall live? I keep asking. How do I turn on Recall in my Copilot + PC? Does anybody know? Has anybody here touched Recall with their fingers? I am getting really paranoid about the whole thing being a collective prank like Santa Claus.
Your characterization of both of those events is inaccurate and aggressively framed in opposite directions, and I’m very curious to know why.
I mean, forget the MS bashing, go nuts on them. Why treat Apple any differently? Back in the day they at least were the underdog, but now? What’s with that?
So was/is Copilot+ and Recall (seriously, how do I turn it on to test it?) and that didn’t stop people.
It’s not planned obsolescence if your device is meant to last for decades. You could argue about the joycon if they had done that on purpose, but given that they ended up having to replace a bunch of them it seems pretty likely that their business model is to sell you four pairs to play with friends, not to keep reselling you more as they break.
Nintendo’s business is not based on the product becoming worse artificially to upsell you on a replacement. Their model is to keep making incremental replacements and then drop a generational upgrade every decade or so. That’s not how planned obsolescence works. You don’t get artificial performance degradation, deliberately fragile parts or artifical restrictions to repair via signed components. People can (and many do) repair Nintendo hardware on third party repair services with third party replacement parts, and from what iFixIt is saying that doesn’t seem to have changed.
Which is not to say Nintendo put ANY thought into repairability here. They clearly expect you to buy a Switch 2 and keep it until you buy a Switch 2 Lite. This thing is very new and that may yet change in both directions. But so far all I see here is the same old “we built this to be cheap and durable”, which is fundamentally not Apple’s “you’ll buy one of these every two years and if it breaks you will come to us for a replacement and like it” approach.
Zen made sense until Firefox rolled out vertical tabs, but there’s little reason to endure all the growing pains and bugs now you can set up basically the exact same thing directly on FF.