>it uses JIS screws rather than Philips (in addition to triwing)

I don't think this is an issue for anyone who has had to disassemble a japanese device before, and the bits are widely available online. Countless youtube videos have discussed that JIS vs Philips in the consumer space are largely compatible outside of american aircraft construction.

I recently changed the battery of my Switch 1, if for most of the process it was easy, and I really struggled on two points. 1) the plastic part into which the screws are screwed broke, and it is tough to remove them. 2) ungluing the battery with isopropyl alcohol without breaking anything was very long for me. I recently changed the USB port of my Fairphone 4 and it was just unscrewing and screwing. So for me it is a great change from Nintendo.

iPhone batteries are actually relatively easy to access and replace. The only annoying thing that Apple (and most other gadgets) insist on is adhesive strip mounting of the battery. Just use screws please.

Torx is also common and also way way better than philips. Really we as a society need to phase out philips screws yesterday.

Disagree. The market will not decide on that, at least for the nintendo product. Your or your kid want the switch and the pokemon and mario and others game, you're buying the switch, you don't switch to something else because the something else allows battery switch.

That's Nintendo's entire business model and the reason why they've been thriving since for ever in gaming and even the bad times where actually positive cash flow wise. They're not losing a single sale because the battery cannot be replaced, unless that sale was far from guaranteed to begin win.

As mentioned elsewhere, it's also important to remember that the batteries were fully serviceable - available for purchase, nicely compartmentized and with easy connectors. The products were definitely not designed to die with their batteries. They just weren't compliant with the new rules - this is quite different than a certain fruit company that have historically made battery replacements difficult for even service technicians to complete without consequences like constant user prompts.

I imagine the various products had their specific own conflicts with the rules, like requiring too much disassembly (the Pro controller in particular has to be disassembled from the front first), or the Switch 2 holding the battery with double-sided tape. Not to mention that you might not realize that the screw are JIS spec, stripping them with the Philips screwdriver you found in your drawer. Also triwing.

How would you ever measure market motivation in such a small market that has max 2-4 viable alternatives?

The market mechanism breaks down in such circumstances.

This doesn't really take into account the real history around user replaceable batteries. It's been happening for years and when there are no alternatives to choose from its not a "vote with your wallet" situation. For example at some point MacBooks just stopped shipping with replaceable batteries and its disingenuous to expect someone to then switch to Dell, Lenovo, or something else. Those platforms can't run MacOS so the choice was made for the users. If you depend on MacOS and the software that runs on it, then your choice was clear--buy a new MacBook with a glued battery.

Consumers do not decide anything, they will buy whatever is in the store.

I mean, XBOX has been doing replaceable batteries in joysticks since forever.

I have both a PS5 and an XBOX Series X. Whenever I am playing if I get out of battery on the XBOX, I just change them. In the PS5 is not possible.

I don't get what the advantage is.

That's true for Sony, but Nintendo doesn't sell the Switch at a loss.

Batteries are chemical devices and have a finite lifespan. There's enough confounding variables involved that some people get real superstitious about it.

Through a combination of internal and external factors, lithium batteries go through irreversible chemical changes on every charge cycle. Total charge capacity always trends down. Depending on a large number of variables, this might happen quickly or it might happen so slow you might never notice at all. It's all down to how and where the battery is used because temperature is mostly what drives the chemical reactions.

The other thing is that lithium batteries which have been deeply discharged below safe levels are permanently damaged. Just like charge cycle wear, this can be immediately apparent, or something that goes unnoticed forever, but the cell is damaged and will never be the same. Recharging such a battery can cause physical damage inside the cell.

Point is, batteries are chemical cells. They don't last forever because most chemical reactions are not perfectly reversible. Their specific application and environment strongly affects how long they last. But we do know conclusively that when lithium batteries are kept hot and charged and discharged at high current (such as in a handheld gaming device), they degrade faster. Cells which are kept at a stable temperature and low currents (such as headphones) degrade very slowly and can last a long time.

If you look past superstition, there's an entire industry that's been rigorously studying this problem for decades. There's a lot of literature and evidence.

Lithium cells do degrade. How fast they degrade depends on cell quality and environmental factors. It is, unequivocally, a question of when a battery will fail. It might well be a decade or two, but it will fail eventually.

Battery failure is a "when" because batteries have a limited number of charge-discharge cycles. Modern lithium-ion batteries have a life expectancy in the range of 300-600 cycles. So if you've never had such a failure, it probably just means you're not a heavy user of your devices.

I try to keep my cell phones as long as I feasibly can. Every single one I've used for more than 3 years has had its battery fail (as expected for a device that sees such heavy cycling). My current phone is on its 3rd replacement battery.

The Switch 1 is almost 10 years old. Batteries don't have that much longevity.

And it was unnecessarily hard (actually dangerous due to fire risk) to replace it with a 3rd-party battery replacement due to excessive amounts of strong adhesive holding the battery in place.

My PSP, maybe five years ago, had a swollen battery. A friend a couple days ago was complaining that his PS4 controller's battery held no charge at all.

All li-ion batteries degrade over time, they may not fail completely, but the capacity will be diminished for sure.

How many years do you use them?

It's not really a small percentage of users. All users will have trouble with the battery - eventually. My DS4s ran out of battery life in about three years of usage; I still have one of them that I use wired with my PC, but I absolutely cannot use it wireless. Likewise with my DS5s - one of them barely held a charge 2-3 years in. I'm sure with good battery management you can extend the lifespan to be closer to 5-6 years, like my M1 MBP from 2021 that still has a 9+h battery life (though down from 12 as I remember), but that only keeps them going for a little longer. It's just a fact of how Li-ion batteries work that they will lose their capacity eventually.

E: DS4 = DualShock 4, DS5 = DualSense; these are the standard PlayStation controllers for the PS4 and the PS5 respectively.

Props for using the Apple wording, I guess.

Quoting just one of the smallest one feels a bit... charged. There's small tradeoffs among all of them when you account for weight.

For everyone else here's the full list:

Switch 2 Battery capacity: 5172mAh, approximately 1% smaller than current version (5220mAh) Weight: Approximately 411g, around 10g heavier than current version With Joy-Con 2 controllers attached: Approximately 548g, around 14g heavier than current version (approximately 534g).

JoyCon 2: Battery capacity: No change. Weight: each 2g heavier

Switch 2 Pro Controller: Battery capacity: 897mAh, approximately 16% smaller than current version (1070mAh). Weight: Approximately 228g, around 7g lighter than current version (approximately 235g).

N64 Controller: Battery capacity: No change. Weight: Approximately 234g, around 1g heavier than current version (approximately 233g)

GameCube controller: Battery capacity: 525mAh, approximately 5% larger than current version (500mAh). Weight: 215g, around 5g heavier than current version (210g).

In more concrete terms, there are modern (2025) smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy XCover7 Pro w/ replaceable batteries which have IP67 (1 meter of water for 30 minutes) or higher certification. The back panel popping off too easily (and dumping the battery with it) is one of the common cons with the device though, so while you can get everything it is an extra layer of difficulty to try to design around correctly.

We love to mock flat-earthers but believe it or not there are many people on HN who don't believe gaskets are a real thing.

Not only that, but if phone batteries were user replaceable, they could be sold in multiple capacities. So people that want "thin" phones can keep their camera protrusions, and the people that want more battery capacity could get a pack that allows the phone to sit flush on a table.

Literally win win win.

Some of these are no change because the existing versions already have pretty user replacement friendly batteries. The JoyCons for example already use the hard sided cells with plugs so I'm not sure what the change will actually amount to. If I had to guess it's maybe to change the glue or method of holding the battery in place to satisfy the ease of replacement requirements.

16% less battery life in a controller is pretty significant!

You still lose capacity with a smaller battery, even if you don't charge it to 100%.

A more complicated design costs more money to build/test and introduces more modes of failure in the final product.

The lower margin for the new variant you mean?

From my experience, it comes from costs generated by:

1. Additional R&D-work and QA for the modification

2. New supply-chain deals for lower-volume components

Current sales-volume of Europe is only a quarter of the global volume, so price-negotiation is based on a much lower total volume-forecast.

Even if not, Battery prices today are ~15% higher than in 2024 (I expect Nintendo signed the supply-deal in late 2024), it'll be hard for Nintendo to cancel their existing supply-contract before fulfilling it (!), move to a different component AND get the same/lower price.

--> Better to sell other regions as-is, fulfill the contract and hope for a better climate in a year.

3. Tooling/Assembly (Ramp-Up costs, different processes, QA,...)

4. Re-certification of HW for relevant bodies in that region (Europe is quite lean on this, CE-certification is simple compared to US FTC/FCC)

I can almost hear the conversation with Nintendo of America CEO about covering 1/3 of the cost to get the same SKU and him simply responding "No, we just raised the prices because of component-cost increase, we wait for the HW-refresh in 2H/2027"

I wouldn't be surprised if they plan to unify the SKU again with a premium "Switch 2 OLED", offsetting the additional costs, preserving the margin and having an additional selling-point...

That's probably because Iceland is not an official Sales-territory of Nintendo, it's handled by Bergsala AB, a swedish distributor which serves the market there.

This makes sense - thanks!

The thing about the TI powerbook was, it didn't have to be plugged in to hot swap the battery. You could do it when running on battery power. (It had a tiny internal battery, that could run it for like 20-30 seconds, so long as the screen was closed).

It did also run when plugged in with the battery removed, which is good 'cause the battery eventually failed. So this way I can still run it.

I have an old ThinkPad as my only laptop. It came to me used, with an aftermarket battery.

That battery was great for a couple of years before it started to get wonky, so I replaced it with a different aftermarket battery.

This process took zero tools. It took less time to swap in a new battery than it did for me to write this comment. Anyone can do it; it is not an arduous procedure.

What was the added environmental cost here? Some "single-use" plastics that lasted for years?

Easily swappable batteries do have significant downsides, you either need to compromise on capacity or form factor.

Of course that doesn’t mean they should be hard to replace with some tools and effort.

To be fair back in those days laptops only lasted on battery power for a few hours at most (also old batteries had a very short lifetime compared to modern ones) so being able to swap it was an actually useful feature.

> Non-replaceable batteries

Most batteries are replaceable. The difference is the level of effort involved.

> The fact that you "do not miss" a better world, does not mean it is not better.

In the abstract, yeah, it's better. But the extra battery cost me a lot of money, and I did not feel it was money well spent.

I don't know about that, i think it's pretty common knowledge that the EU caused the iPhone port change, and it's generally regarded as a good thing

All of those things can be recycled and almost all of them can be replaced whether or not its end-user-servicable.