The long-awaited Nintendo Swap 2 lastly dropped this week, and whereas it makes quite a lot of large enhancements on its predecessor—issues like a greater display, beefier inside specs, and extra accessible controls—there’s one factor it is worse at. In keeping with the repairability advocates and gleeful disassemblers at iFixit, it is even more durable to repair than the unique Swap.
Maybe most worrying for brand new house owners is that, regardless of a brand new “from the bottom up” redesign for the Swap’s Pleasure-Con controllers, the foundation reason behind stick drift—one thing that many house owners of the unique have lengthy complained of—would not appear to have been actually addressed within the Swap 2.
Courtesy of iFixit
Stick drift is one thing that may occur to joysticks, often over time or below heavy utilization, the place motion is registered with out person enter. iFixit factors out that less-drifty joystick tech that depends on magnets as an alternative of potentiometers, like Corridor impact or tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors, can assist stop this, but it surely discovered neither of these current within the Swap 2.
“From what we are able to inform, the redesign didn’t embody a revision to the core tech that causes joystick drift,” iFixit writes in its weblog submit. “Except Nintendo is utilizing some miracle new materials on these resistive tracks, or the change in measurement magically solves it, the perfect repair goes to come back from third-party replacements once more.”
Even worse, iFixit discovered that changing the Pleasure-Con controllers is definitely harder this time spherical. “No matter tech they use … joysticks are a high-wear element. They will nonetheless break in a drop, even when they by no means undergo from drift. Having the ability to change this stuff is a excessive precedence for sport console repairability.”
General, iFixit has given the Swap 2 a repairability rating of three out of 10. That’s one level decrease than the 4 out of 10 it just lately retroactively gave the primary Swap, and lags behind the likes of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Collection X, each of which received 7 out of 10.
