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 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 tougher to repair than the unique Change.
Maybe most worrying for brand new house owners is that, regardless of a brand new “from the bottom up” redesign for the Change’s Pleasure-Con controllers, the basis explanation for stick drift—one thing that many house owners of the unique have lengthy complained of—does 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 underneath heavy utilization, the place motion is registered with out person 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, might help stop this, but it surely discovered neither of these current within the Change 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 publish. “Until Nintendo is utilizing some miracle new materials on these resistive tracks, or the change in dimension magically solves it, the most effective repair goes to come back 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 element. They will nonetheless break in a drop, even when they by no means endure from drift. Having the ability to exchange these items is a excessive precedence for recreation console repairability.”
General, 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 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.