The long-awaited Nintendo Change 2 lastly dropped this week, and whereas it makes quite a few massive enhancements on its predecessor—issues like a greater display, beefier inside specs, and extra accessible controls—there’s one factor it is worse at. In response to the repairability advocates and gleeful disassemblers at iFixit, it is even tougher to repair than the unique Change.
Maybe most worrying for brand spanking new homeowners is that, regardless of a brand new “from the bottom up” redesign for the Change’s Pleasure-Con controllers, the foundation explanation for stick drift—one thing that many homeowners 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 beneath 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 forestall this, but it surely discovered neither of these current within the Change 2.
“From what we will inform, the redesign didn’t embody a revision to the core tech that causes joystick drift,” iFixit writes in its weblog put up. “Until Nintendo is utilizing some miracle new materials on these resistive tracks, or the change in dimension 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 endure from drift. Having the ability to change these items is a excessive precedence for sport 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 not too long ago retroactively gave the primary Change, and lags behind the likes of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence X, each of which received 7 out of 10.
