The long-awaited Nintendo Change 2 lastly dropped this week, and whereas it makes various large enhancements on its predecessor—issues like a greater display, beefier inner specs, and extra accessible controls—there may be one factor it is worse at. Based on the repairability advocates and gleeful disassemblers at iFixit, it is even more durable to repair than the unique Change.
Maybe most worrying for brand spanking new house owners is that, regardless of a brand new “from the bottom up” redesign for the Change’s Pleasure-Con controllers, the basis reason for stick drift—one thing that many homeowners of the unique have lengthy complained of—would not appear to have been actually addressed within the Change 2.
Courtesy of iFixit
Stick drift is one thing that may occur to joysticks, normally over time or below heavy utilization, the place motion is registered with out consumer enter. iFixit factors out that less-drifty joystick tech that depends on magnets as a substitute of potentiometers, like Corridor impact or tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors, may also help stop this, but it surely discovered neither of these current within the Change 2.
“From what we will inform, the redesign didn’t embrace a revision to the core tech that causes joystick drift,” iFixit writes in its weblog put up. “Except Nintendo is utilizing some miracle new materials on these resistive tracks, or the change in measurement magically solves it, one of the best repair goes to return 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 part. They will nonetheless break in a drop, even when they by no means undergo from drift. With the ability to exchange these items is a excessive precedence for recreation console repairability.”
Total, iFixit has given the Change 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 Change, and lags behind the likes of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence X, each of which acquired 7 out of 10.
