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NATO on 28 February 2017
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zorg1000 said:
NATO said:

Like I already said, it's fine if you guys want to wave your hand and dismiss it, and you're welcome to do exactly that, it doesn't fix the issue however, and it's an issue that's only going to get worse over time until Nintendo either release a redesign or change the material used for the latch.

Are there any other instances of this happening? Because this is the only I have heard of and was previously dropped on a hard surface (just because left is the only to come off when dropped, doesnt mean right wasnt affected).

Its hard to call something an issue when there is only one example of it happening making it reasonable to dismiss until further examples (preferably when not dropped on concrete) come to surface.

Let's be honest here, the likelyhood that a small fall broke the latch on one side is fairly good, he even stated that it popped off when it fell, the other however didn't, and the likelyhood that both latch mechanisms broke when the unit was dropped is much, much smaller.

But this still leaves two issues, 

1) the latches are prone to breaking - wear or not, a small fall could break both latches - this isn't a great outcome regardless.
2) right now there are only a very small number of reviewers with their hands on switch consoles, (maybe 500 or so worldwide?), and while I agree this being the only instance well documented regarding it, you also have to keep in mind that the majority of these reviewers are using units they need to use in the future for reviews of games, so they will have a tendancy to baby the system much more than the average customer would.

The real question here is, what happens when that number of 500 or so changes to 1 million?, even at a ration of 1 in 500, a million consoles sold results in thousands of people with the issue if that million all baby the system in the same way - when you have hundreds of thousands of kids who aren't so careful with their hands on them, I can see that number being much different.

As I said, it's a design failure, a latched controller should only be removable by manually depressing the latch button - for the gameboy the cartidge latch was just a 1.5mm thick plastic protrusion from the power button that would slide out into the slot in the corner of the cartidge and it was enough to prevent the removal of carts, even with a great amount of force - yet with the switch, it's potentially possible to pop it off with much, much less.

I suspect Nintendo will release a revised model that uses a slightly different but compatible latch design at some point this year, likely swapping the ABS material used for the latch clip with a composite material too, to reduce the wear issue.