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The long-awaited Nintendo Change 2 lastly dropped this week, and whereas it makes a lot of huge 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 keeping 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 foundation reason 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, 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 an alternative of potentiometers, like Corridor impact or tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors, may help forestall this, nevertheless it 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 publish. “Until Nintendo is utilizing some miracle new materials on these resistive tracks, or the change in measurement magically solves it, the perfect 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’ll nonetheless break in a drop, even when they by no means endure from drift. Having the ability to exchange this stuff 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 not too long ago retroactively gave the primary Change, and lags behind the likes of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Collection X, each of which acquired 7 out of 10.
