Nintendo to give lifelong free repairs for Joycons

[SenSnowy]

Following an alert from the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), the European Commission and EU consumer authorities (Network of Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Authorities) contacted Nintendo to address a recurring technical problem with irresponsive controllers. Following this action, Nintendo has agreed to offer all consumers the right to repair for affected controllers of the “Nintendo Switch” gaming console free of charge, even beyond the legal guarantee. The joint action was led by the Greek Ministry of Development and Investments and the German Environment Agency, and coordinated by the European Commission.
 

 

Summary

 Free lifelong Joycen repairs for EU citizen. 

 

Quotes

Quote

I am pleased that Nintendo voluntarily took the steps to address concerns about compliance with EU consumer law, addressing the early obsolescence of certain controllers, and offering a lifelong right to free repair for this specific issue. This will prevent the disposal of unrepaired controllers and unnecessary waste. In line with our proposal on the right to repair, we expect companies to effectively improve the reparability of their products and the information available on it, in order to empower consumers to become real actors in the green transition.

Didier Reynders, Commissioner for Justice - 04/04/2023

 

My thoughts

 I do hope Xbox and Sony follows suit and this pushes the market to use different sensors. 
 

Sources

 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_2106

[AnotherLinus]

The article seems to be gone (I saw it earlier today) but their Tweet is still up. I'm wondering what happened?

 

[Sauron]

Nice, too bad it won't cover the joycon my sister smashed on the floor  had to repair that one myself

[wanderingfool2]

8 hours ago, SenSnowy said:

Following this action, Nintendo has agreed to offer all consumers the right to repair for affected controllers of the “Nintendo Switch” gaming console free of charge, even beyond the legal guarantee

So they might make a new Switch soon?  After-all a few years after the next console comes out they can say the Switch's lifetime is over.  It's the issue with the wording lifelong, is it referring to the products lifespan?  I'm going to assume that is how Nintendo interprets it (and might assume it will cost less than fighting it out for the next few years)

 

8 hours ago, SenSnowy said:

this pushes the market to use different sensors

Cost I think will be the biggest factor and sadly I think it's likely the patents that cause the higher costs.

 

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20100173711A1/en

So while the sensor itself is relatively cheap (although still more than the current), the company if they wanted to could try holding out for a lot of money (or simply pricing it above what the others are willing to eat in cost)

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

So they might make a new Switch soon? 

 

Doubtful. The OLED switch was what, 1.5 years ago? You're not gonna throw out that tooling after year.

 

Historically Nintendo consoles go through three phases:

Launch model (most units in the wild), 2017 - switch 

Revised internals model (identical to launch model, but maybe revision B/C chips) 2019 - switch

Reduced functionality model (like the 3DS becoming a 2DS, or the Wii losing network connectivity) - Switch.Lite

Final model until discontinued. 

 

The only time that didn't happen was with the WiiU. All other consoles have been that way from the NES/SNES to the 3DS and Wii. So far the Switch has done all four steps.

 

But there has been zero noise about another model. The logical next model is a 4K model. Because Nvidia has discontinued the X1 products itself. The X1 is basically a 2015-era GPU SoC. Nvidia is not currently marketing or producing any SoC's for anything except automotive SoC's.

 

So unless NVIDIA has been keeping a Tegra successor using Hopper under their hats for Nintendo, which I doubt, there is simply no upgrade path for the switch. Nintendo can't pull what they did with the GC/Wii/WiiU and then abandon it. 

 

The logical upgrade path is not a "4K Switch" because there is no hardware that can do that. PC GPU's you can either go from an x60 part to an x80 part to go from 1080p to 4K, without changing any other part. Those parts don't exist as a SoC. SoC upgrades are like going from an x60 to another x60 of newer generations. But even then, Nvidia hasn't done that. X60 parts are nerfed to 1080p experiences and lack the memory bandwidth to put out a 4K experience.

 

Nintendo doesn't really have much of an option here, because an off-the-shelf part costs less, but you're under the whim of the manufacturer (in this case Nvidia.) That's a lesson that Apple learned way back when they dropped the PPC tech, and the same reason why Sony dropped the PPC tech. Nintendo held out the longest on it.

 

So my guess is that Nintendo might have something in the works, but it's likely not a 4K handheld. There is no demand for one. A 4K television console, yes, but televisions have no touch input. So that means a new controller with touch-input, like what the PS consoles use.

 

At any rate there is no real demand from users for a "better" switch. Developers, yes. People would rather be able to play 8 hours and not hear a high pitch fan blaring at them, than go the "steamdeck" route and basically have a gaming iGPU laptop folded inside.

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

 

Doubtful. The OLED switch was what, 1.5 years ago? You're not gonna throw out that tooling after year.

 

Historically Nintendo consoles go through three phases:

Launch model (most units in the wild), 2017 - switch 

Revised internals model (identical to launch model, but maybe revision B/C chips) 2019 - switch

Reduced functionality model (like the 3DS becoming a 2DS, or the Wii losing network connectivity) - Switch.Lite

Final model until discontinued. 

 

The only time that didn't happen was with the WiiU. All other consoles have been that way from the NES/SNES to the 3DS and Wii. So far the Switch has done all four steps.

 

But there has been zero noise about another model. The logical next model is a 4K model. Because Nvidia has discontinued the X1 products itself. The X1 is basically a 2015-era GPU SoC. Nvidia is not currently marketing or producing any SoC's for anything except automotive SoC's.

 

So unless NVIDIA has been keeping a Tegra successor using Hopper under their hats for Nintendo, which I doubt, there is simply no upgrade path for the switch. Nintendo can't pull what they did with the GC/Wii/WiiU and then abandon it. 

 

The logical upgrade path is not a "4K Switch" because there is no hardware that can do that. PC GPU's you can either go from an x60 part to an x80 part to go from 1080p to 4K, without changing any other part. Those parts don't exist as a SoC. SoC upgrades are like going from an x60 to another x60 of newer generations. But even then, Nvidia hasn't done that. X60 parts are nerfed to 1080p experiences and lack the memory bandwidth to put out a 4K experience.

 

Nintendo doesn't really have much of an option here, because an off-the-shelf part costs less, but you're under the whim of the manufacturer (in this case Nvidia.) That's a lesson that Apple learned way back when they dropped the PPC tech, and the same reason why Sony dropped the PPC tech. Nintendo held out the longest on it.

 

So my guess is that Nintendo might have something in the works, but it's likely not a 4K handheld. There is no demand for one. A 4K television console, yes, but televisions have no touch input. So that means a new controller with touch-input, like what the PS consoles use.

 

At any rate there is no real demand from users for a "better" switch. Developers, yes. People would rather be able to play 8 hours and not hear a high pitch fan blaring at them, than go the "steamdeck" route and basically have a gaming iGPU laptop folded inside.

Not a ton of routes for Nintendo to go if they want to stick to handheld/portable hardware, and maintain decent battery life. Maybe they could contract Qualcomm for some cut down Snapdragon chips (namely disabling the modem, and some unneeded features), though I think the best route for them is to design in-house SoCs, even if much of it is licensed. They can at least tailor it to their needs, and avoid wasted silicon. 
 

Using modern tech, they should at least approach, if not exceed Xbox One performance, while not using excessive amounts of power. Though that may not be enough of a jump to justify a new console generation. This is a challenge, as a portable game console is even more tightly bound to power restrictions, owing to needing consistent performance over long periods of time, while smartphone loads can easily get away with high burst performance. 

[tim0901]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

*snip*

Actually, there have been plenty of rumours recently about the next-gen Nintendo console, which might be closer than you think. Just this week there have been reports that devkits for this console are now being sent out, which would suggest it's not too far away. 2024 was always the rumoured timeframe.

 

The specs are roughly believed to be a 1080p-class device similar in performance to the PS4, with a 1080p OLED display. But when docked, the output would be upscaled to 4k using DLSS. The chip itself has been long rumoured to be a cut-down derivative of Nvidia's Ampere-based Orin SOC, which lines up closely with the Orin Nano and Orin NX SOCs that Nvidia released back in January. These would be suitable candidates in terms of both erformance and power consumption, fitting right alongside the Switch's 10-15WTDP.