The long-awaited The Nintendo Switch 2 ended up falling this week, and despite the many major improvements made by its predecessor (such as a better screen, more powerful internal specs and more accessible controls), there’s one more thing that’s worse. According to Ifixit’s repairability advocate and the Gleeful disassembler, it’s harder to fix than the original switch.
Perhaps the most worrying thing about the new owner is that despite the new “from-scratch” redesign of the switch’s Joy-Con controller, the root cause of the stick drift – something that many of the original owners have long complained about, but it doesn’t seem to have really been addressed in the Switch 2.
Provided by Ifixit
Rocker drift is something that can happen to joysticks, often registering motion without user input over time or in heavy use. Ifixit notes that relying on magnets instead of potentiometers, such as Hall effect or tunnel magnetomagnetic (TMR) sensors, can help prevent this, but it has found none of those in the Switch 2.
“To the best of our knowledge, the redesign does not include revisions to the core technology that causes joystick drift,” ifixit wrote in its blog post. “Unless Nintendo uses some miracle new material on these resistor tracks, or changes in size magically solve it, the best fix will again come from third-party alternatives.”
Worse, Ifixit found that this round was actually harder to replace the Joy-Con controller. “No matter which technology they use…the joysticks are high-mounted components. Even if they never suffer the loss of drift, they can still break. Being able to replace these things is a high priority for the repairability of the game console.”
Overall, Ifixit gave the Switch 2 a repairability score of 3 out of 10. This is one point lower than the recently traced 10 points and trails the first switch after the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, 7 points in both.
