- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Weird. It certainly could be better, but the Switch wasn’t that hard to fix I’d say. I mean, if it was, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I have quite a few dead electronic devices lying around that I probably broke more than they were originally.
On my switch I changed a SD card drive and the fan, and that required unmounting quite a bit of it. I was very slow at it, but it’s more annoying than hard. Mostly solder-less with just a lot of screws and pins locked in with small levers.
Also I opened lots of joycons, and while it’s not hard, yeah fuck those flimsy pieces of shit. Of course I changed sticks a lot (with other shitty sticks, Hall effect joycon sticks weren’t a thing yet) and changed a couple rails, those tend to fail too.
Yeah, I don’t do electronic repair like that, but the videos I saw didn’t look super difficult like you had to unglue 14 things to get inside.
Joy Con 1 is a design disaster internally. I really question how they managed to get past testing sometimes. The original board on the right Joy Con that came with my Switch was so poorly made they even forgot to fully solder in the R button, causing it to literally fall off during disassembly. As a parting gift, the casing plastics developed a crack around one of the screw holes, causing the screw to no longer go in properly. I had to hack together a shell from a parts Joy Con I bought, since it was a special Smash edition Joy Con that I couldn’t get a new replacement of.
I don’t get why Nintendo felt the need to hide screws behind stickers, or to glue down the battery so hard. Switch 1 was fairly easy to open up. Hopefully right to repair legislation can force Nintendo into providing official parts and repair guides before Switch 2 batteries start dying.
Nintendo is the Apple of video games. They don’t want people to repair it, either send it back for a depot repair or buy a new one. They want you to treat it as a sealed product.
Yeah, Nintendo have always had a bit of a weird mentality when it comes to their hardware. They always like doing things their way, and for you to only deal with them for repairs and service (as far as I know not even having a repair partner program to make their service easier to access). It’s a shame, considering their hardware has been fairly modular and easy to open in general.
I think that they made it harder so that people would give in and just buying new controllers or consoles instead of doing the repairs themselves or taking them somewhere to get repaired as repair shops will charge more for a longer/more difficult job
Potentially. I’m leaning more incompetence/“we always did it this way”/cost cutting rather than malice though, considering Joy Con 2 has a fairly easily repairable design like Joy Con 1. They probably just shoved on a bunch of adhesive for the battery, for example, since it was the most cost effective way to keep the battery from moving about on the go while taking no time in the factory (the only time they care about the assembly). Steam Deck did the same thing (although ROG Ally was smart and actually used screws and brackets to hold its battery down). It’s a lazy and stupid solution, but it is a solution.
