71–80 of 229 posts
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They could've just designed it that way to begin with. Thanks to this regulation, they will the next time around.
A more complicated design costs more money to build/test and introduces more modes of failure in the final product.
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It's not that they didn't care, it's that they did care in the wrong way. A non-replacable battery means people will be more likely to buy a whole new device if (when) the battery fails.
I think the more likely explanation is that there was not sufficient market motiviation to include the additional requirement of a user-swappable battery. ie. people care, but they don't care enough or in enough volume for Nintendo to decide it's required. I celebrate user-swappable batteries and I think I like the battery regulations. I just don't think the Ghost of Iwata is under your bed twirling a Wario moustache…
That's Nintendo's entire business model and the reason why they've been thriving since for ever in gaming and even the bad times where actually positive cash flow wise. They're not losing a single sale because the battery cannot be replaced, unless that sale was far from guaranteed to begin win.
"There is no difference in functionality between current products and revised products containing user-replaceable batteries." So there was nothing "limiting" them from making it already with user-replaceable batteries, they just didn't care enough until EU forced them (like all the smartphone brands). Love EU.
It's not that they didn't care, it's that they did care in the wrong way. A non-replacable battery means people will be more likely to buy a whole new device if (when) the battery fails.
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It's not that they didn't care, it's that they did care in the wrong way. A non-replacable battery means people will be more likely to buy a whole new device if (when) the battery fails.
I don't understand why battery failure is a "when". The only batteries I've ever had fail in rechargeable electronic devices were replaceable packs where water got into the compartment. Perhaps I've just gotten lucky?
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According to their latest fiscal report [0], Europe sales-volume of Switch2 is ~24% of the total global sales volume. The change surely eats into their margin per device, so they prefer to keep the higher margin for the rest of the world and recalculate their margin for europe. However interesting: "The Americas" sells 34% of all Switch2 in the world [0]. I wouldn't expect the US to mandate the same changes, but if e…
The higher margin is mostly coming from assembly costs, right? I can't imagine it comes from the actual cost of the battery being so much higher. I hope that once they start pushing these out and retool factories for them they can sell them more broadly.
From my experience, it comes from costs generated by:
1. Additional R&D-work and QA for the modification
2. New supply-chain deals for lower-volume components
Current sales-volume of Europe is only a quarter of the global volume, so price-negotiation is based on a much lower total volume-forecast.
Even if not, Battery prices today are ~15% higher than in 2024 (I expect Nintendo signed the supply-deal in late 2024), it'll be hard for Nintendo to cancel their existing supply-contract before fulfilling it (!), move to a different component AND get the same/lower price.
--> Better to sell other regions as-is, fulfill the contract and hope for a better climate in a year.
3. Tooling/Assembly (Ramp-Up costs, different processes, QA,...)
4. Re-certification of HW for relevant bodies in that region (Europe is quite lean on this, CE-certification is simple compared to US FTC/FCC)
I can almost hear the conversation with Nintendo of America CEO about covering 1/3 of the cost to get the same SKU and him simply responding "No, we just raised the prices because of component-cost increase, we wait for the HW-refresh in 2H/2027"
I wouldn't be surprised if they plan to unify the SKU again with a premium "Switch 2 OLED", offsetting the additional costs, preserving the margin and having an additional selling-point...
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It's not that they didn't care, it's that they did care in the wrong way. A non-replacable battery means people will be more likely to buy a whole new device if (when) the battery fails.
I don't understand why battery failure is a "when". The only batteries I've ever had fail in rechargeable electronic devices were replaceable packs where water got into the compartment. Perhaps I've just gotten lucky?
Through a combination of internal and external factors, lithium batteries go through irreversible chemical changes on every charge cycle. Total charge capacity always trends down. Depending on a large number of variables, this might happen quickly or it might happen so slow you might never notice at all. It's all down to how and where the battery is used because temperature is mostly what drives the chemical reactions.
The other thing is that lithium batteries which have been deeply discharged below safe levels are permanently damaged. Just like charge cycle wear, this can be immediately apparent, or something that goes unnoticed forever, but the cell is damaged and will never be the same. Recharging such a battery can cause physical damage inside the cell.
Point is, batteries are chemical cells. They don't last forever because most chemical reactions are not perfectly reversible. Their specific application and environment strongly affects how long they last. But we do know conclusively that when lithium batteries are kept hot and charged and discharged at high current (such as in a handheld gaming device), they degrade faster. Cells which are kept at a stable temperature and low currents (such as headphones) degrade very slowly and can last a long time.
If you look past superstition, there's an entire industry that's been rigorously studying this problem for decades. There's a lot of literature and evidence.
Lithium cells do degrade. How fast they degrade depends on cell quality and environmental factors. It is, unequivocally, a question of when a battery will fail. It might well be a decade or two, but it will fail eventually.
Honestly, amazing stuff. For all the flak that the EU gets this is absolutely an essential regulation
One might argue that this is one of the reason why the EU is getting flak: because it sets up regulations that lower some companies profit.
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It's not that they didn't care, it's that they did care in the wrong way. A non-replacable battery means people will be more likely to buy a whole new device if (when) the battery fails.
I don't think that's it for console manufacturers. They make the majority of their money on game sales, so they want the console itself to be used for as long as possible.
"There is no difference in functionality between current products and revised products containing user-replaceable batteries." So there was nothing "limiting" them from making it already with user-replaceable batteries, they just didn't care enough until EU forced them (like all the smartphone brands). Love EU.
But there is at least some argument that smartphones nowadays have some pretty crazy waterproofness that I'm not sure is physically possible with a replaceable battery?
"There is no difference in functionality between current products and revised products containing user-replaceable batteries." So there was nothing "limiting" them from making it already with user-replaceable batteries, they just didn't care enough until EU forced them (like all the smartphone brands). Love EU.