Switch Battery Life Ranges From 2.5-6 Hours (3 Hours For Zelda)

[mutantsushi]

MDMAlliance said:

mutantsushi said:

Here's an easy way for better battery life: Use a modern 14nm chip like every current launching tablet does.
It offers simple ~30% performance:watt gain.  Meaning they could get better performance at same power.
Or they could get much lower battery drain for the same performance.  Or something in between.
The thing is fucking shit, they charge a fortune for freaking battery charger/HDMI/USB pass-thru "dock".

At least they are consistent.

I like how you only quoted the first sentence I said and left out the most important detail.
"I think providing a decent battery life to the Switch would have been very difficult if they wanted to keep the price where it is."

Only problem is, that isn't really a "detail", it doesn't present coherent linkage of one to the other.
PS4 and Xbox last year launched Slims with 14nm at much cheaper price than OG.
Countless laptops, smartphones and tablets have launched on modern fab nodes without increasing price.
The whole point of smaller fab nodes is fitting more chips in the same area, which is inclined to reduce costs.
Wafer costs increase, but the fact there is ~30% more chips in same area offsets that, as well as performance/battery benefits.
14nm is not bleeding edge process, it's already gone thru multiple revisions, and yields are by now good and mature.
And cost of CPU is one small part of the console production cost in the first place.  So how is cost relevant here?
Hell, if they reduce power draw they can reduce the size of the batteries themself while keeping battery life the same.