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MDMAlliance on 13 January 2017
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mutantsushi said:
MDMAlliance said:

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.

Several things.  Is it confirmed that the Switch isn't using a 14nm?  I thought this was just a speculation/rumor and not actually confirmed.  

I also would like to know where you get your numbers from (like 30%) and not everything is so straight forward.  You are also making it seem like battery life is the only thing to be concerned about when making a system, when it's a lot more complex than that.  A lot of other things need to go into it, so it's not like they can just add and/or remove things willy nilly.  It's more like they have a budget and if they add somewhere, they likely have to remove somewhere else or increase the price.  (I also don't think anyone on this forum knows enough about the switch's hardware to make the claim that they could do what you claim they can).  Maybe not absolutely necessary, but it's also about what they believe is sustainable.  

Maybe you didn't know this, but battery technology has been lagging behind other electronics in advancements so battery life in many products have become issues because of it.