The long-awaited Nintendo Change 2 lastly dropped this week, and whereas it makes plenty of huge enhancements on its predecessor—issues like a greater display, beefier inside specs, and extra accessible controls—there may be one factor it is worse at. In accordance with 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 homeowners is that, regardless of a brand new “from the ground up” redesign for the Change’s Pleasure-Con controllers, the foundation explanation for 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 Change 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, may also help forestall this, however it discovered neither of these current within the Change 2.
“From what we can tell, the redesign didn’t include a revision to the core tech that causes joystick drift,” iFixit writes in its weblog put up. “Unless Nintendo is using some miracle new material on those resistive tracks, or the change in size magically solves it, the best fix is going to come from third-party replacements again.”
Even worse, iFixit discovered that changing the Pleasure-Con controllers is definitely harder this time spherical. “Whatever tech they use … joysticks are a high-wear component. They can still break in a drop, even if they never suffer from drift. Being able to replace these things is a high priority for game 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 Collection X, each of which obtained 7 out of 10.
