The long-awaited Nintendo Swap 2 lastly dropped this week, and whereas it makes quite a lot of massive enhancements on its predecessor—issues like a greater display screen, beefier inner specs, and extra accessible controls—there’s one factor it is worse at. In line 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 really addressed within the Swap 2.
Courtesy of iFixit
Stick drift is one thing that may occur to joysticks, often over time or beneath heavy utilization, the place motion is registered with out consumer 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 forestall this, however it discovered neither of these current within the Swap 2.
“From what we are able to inform, the redesign didn’t embrace a revision to the core tech that causes joystick drift,” iFixit writes in its weblog submit. “Until Nintendo is utilizing some miracle new materials on these resistive tracks, or the change in dimension magically solves it, the very best repair goes to come back from third-party replacements once more.”
Even worse, iFixit discovered that changing the Pleasure-Con controllers is definitely tougher this time spherical. “No matter tech they use … joysticks are a high-wear part. They will nonetheless break in a drop, even when they by no means undergo from drift. With the ability to substitute these items is a excessive precedence for sport console repairability.”
Total, 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 not too long ago retroactively gave the primary Swap, and lags behind the likes of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence X, each of which obtained 7 out of 10.
