| nemo37 said: I do agree that they should probably introduce a model with higher storage capacity (I mostly think having an SKU like this would be better for less tech savy people that want more storage out of the box). With that being said though, I am on my 7th smartphone right now and I mostly just purchase the smallest storage capacity SKU available (typically 32 GB-64 GB on most of the more premium smartphones today) and expand it with an SD card; this is because I have found I can get a bigger SD card for the same price or sometimes even lower than having to pay for larger storage SKU for a phone. In your comment you mentioned that Switch should have at least 64 GB because most smartphones offer that storage at the Switch's and those there are ones that offer 128 GB at $50 higher prices. Having done some brief research on the internet, I have not found a single phone that has a 64 GB option at $300 or 128 GB option for $350. In a market filled with smartphones, I do not doubt that you will inevitably find a phone at that price and with the storage options you mentioned but you have to take into consideration that those are low spec phones (heck all of the phones I could find at 32 GB at $300, which is the Switch's price, were all using chips that were considerably weaker than the chip inside the Switch) that are much less powerful than the switch. If Nintendo wanted to offer a 64 GB or 128 GB option at the same price as the current Switch then other things would have to be sacrificed on the system to make it happen. Of course, there will come a time when mass production of 64 GB and even 128 GB chips will reduce cost to the point where it is feasible to put in a $300 device like Switch (I suspect that will happen sooner rather than later for the 64 GB variant) but judging by the $300 smartphones I have seen now is still not the time. I don't think expecting Switch to have the same storage capacity as PS4 and Xbox One is reasonable, considering those systems have mechanical hard drives which are cheaper whereas Switch has to rely on more expensive flash storage. Putting, even a smaller 1.8" hard drive, would increase the size, weight, speed (hard drives for portable systems have mechanisms that stop the drive from spinning upon detecting motion to prevent damage to the drive; this mechanism works but it makes the unit slower), exhibit higher power consumption, and finally it is far less durable. For a device that meant to be moved around a lot, having a mechanical hard drive is simply not practical. In addition, it is also important to mention that all PS4 and Xbox One games have mandatory game installs with their physical copies; while there are a number of physical Switch games where you need to install half of the content on the system, most games right now do not require that and you can run the games right off of the cartridge. It is the same issue with the cartridges. Yes they are more expensive than a similar sized blu-ray disk, but you don't really have any other options if you want physical media on the Switch. The reality is that Nintendo can only use what is on the market in their products. Unfortunately, we are at the point where flash storage is still more costly than hard drives (you get less space per dollar), and a similar case can be made with flash ROM cartridges compared to blu-ray disks. However, with Switch being a portable, I cannot see Nintendo being able to fit a Blu-ray drive or a mechanical hard drive in the device without making huge compromises to the portability. |
I see you live in Canada, I do not. Prices here are quite different. The cheapest I can possibly get the Switch here right now is about 382$ (3299SEK), you can find a Huawei P20 Lite for the same exact price. Yes, the rest of the hardware is quite different, the Huawei sports a weaker CPU (it has a decent CPU though, not too far off on some benchmarks compared to a Tegra X1) and GPU, which is a given seeing as how it's not really a gaming device. But it has twice the storage, and the need for storage on a smartphone is certainly a lot smaller than on a console, pictures and simple documents and movies don't take up that much space at all (I have almost 90GB left of my 128 total, for instance).
I've not claimed that the Switch should have 1TB of storage either, I merely pointed out that the two main competitors sport this size at roughly the same total prize, with better memory, CPU and GPU on top, so that's not really an argument either. All I'm saying is that 32GB, minus the space the OS requires is tiny in any gaming console today, when we know that digital is growing and growing and games aren't getting smaller either.
As far as differences between SSD and HDD, I'm fully aware of these, any PC nerd would be butchered if he didn't... So; I know they are different technologies, that's still not a good argument for having a paltry 32GB of internal storage out of the box. Spinning drives would indeed cause issues in a device meant to be a hybrid and thus portable, and in terms of both spin and sheer size, physical discs are out of the question as well. One of the issues with Nintendo opting to use cartridges and SSD drives and citing transfer speed as a huge plus is the fact that the other, technical limitations of the hardware more or less nullifies this advantage, the limited RAM more so than most. Especially in Zelda: BotW, it becomes evident that you're playing on a device with a very limited work memory in comparison with the tasks its meant to perform, there is severe pop-in all over the place, and all the speedy transfer rates of internal storage or physical media in the world won't change that.
Yes, they are indeed limited by the market, but this is a choice they made, and it's only fair to alleviate some of the cost and hassle from potential customers by adding more storage, ordering in bulk for a device that sells well, and using parts that are present in the most sold media devices in the world, the costs of bigger SSD units would be significantly smaller for Nintendo internally than they would be for customers, but the added benefit of a much more capable machine would be huge, both from a developer and consumers perspective.
I'm not sure if my wording is causing the issue here, or perhaps my point just isn't clear to others, but I never stated that you can't fix it yourself by using SD cards, nor have I suggested that I have the right to a 1TB drive in a gaming device. What I'm saying is that 32GB is way too small to expect from a console in 2018, and that it is unreasonable and unfair to shove added cost onto the end user when the manufacturer themselves have chosen a path that limits the options for all parties involved, and that this goes double seeing as how Nintendo have always charged some fairly steep prices for their controllers, peripherals and even software. It's already costly enough to be a Ninty gamer, let's not make it worse, especially if the added cost is down to technical limitations caused by Nintendo not being up to date on certain features by making certain design choices.
