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Soundwave on 05 September 2023
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

I could see two SKUs for the reason that

1.) People who are digital only or even a big chunk of their library is digital need a lot more storage space, especially if Switch 2 is going to be a kind of PS4-to-PS5 in-between-ey kind of deal as it sounds like. The Call of Duty games are over 120GB just for one game, now probably they will make an effort to compress some of that, but those games will still eat up a ton of space. And the crowd that is buying digital these days is getting bigger and bigger, I think physical media (sadly) is going to be a minority audience going forward. Even for physical cart buyers, odds are a lot of 3rd party games will opt to only put a minimal amount of data on the cart (or in some cases none at all) and require you to download the rest too, so there's no getting around the need for lots of storage space. 

2.) It makes Nintendo more money. They can charge $50 more for a 256GB model (over say a 128GB for the standard model), but the truth is Nintendo as a massive bulk manufacturing order is going to be getting that extra 128GB in storage space for a lot cheaper than $50. They probably pay $10 or less to double the storage space but get to charge $50 more for it. You got to like that math if you're Nintendo. 

$399.99 - 64GB or 128GB
$449.99 - 256GB

Wouldn't shock me exactly. 

Your post is stupid. The massmarket isn't oblivious to the ever-dropping prices of SD cards. By the time Switch 2 is out, it should be very common to find 512 GB SD cards going for $50 and under. Heck, 1 TB micro SD cards cost only around $100 today.

If someone is digital-only and in need of more storage and has the choice between your hypothetical 256 GB Switch 2 for $450 or your hypothetical 64 GB Switch 2 with a 1 TB SD card for $500 combined... it's not hard to do the math here.

It's funny how you always jump on whatever the latest rumor is and come up with fantasy scenarios. Also funny how you love to talk about technology, but fail at pretty much the most basic level of storage capacity and its price.

Sure you can get a junk Micro SD Card for $50 with a lot of storage, but that's going to be a crap 100-170MB/sec card that's slow as molasses. Just like you can get an old regular fat HDD with 4TB and declare yourself a genius because you have way more storage than the NVMe drives Sony and MS sell for the PS5/XSX. There's just one problem, your drive is a turtle by comparison. 

Nintendo could easily get UFS 3.0 or 3.1 speed internal flash storage, which can have up to 2100MB/sec read speed, it will blow any SD Card out of the water. And UFS 3.0 isn't some magical new or exotic technology, it's just the standard flash memory that's in hundreds of millions of Android phones and tablets already. And UFS 3.0 is the *old* standard from 2018, the new Android devices use UFS 4.0 which is double the speed, so Nintendo would likely be getting the 3.0/3.1 dated version for a laugher of a cost. 

If Nintendo were to offer it, I think plenty of people would rather pay the extra $50 and have the higher speed internal storage. Relative to what you pay to go up in storage for say an iPhone or iPad, getting double or quadruple (lol) the amount of high speed internal storage that's way faster than an SD Card for only $50 more is not bad at all. Also a lot of those cheap SD Cards have high failure rates and don't actually even hit the low end speed they claim, seen plenty of "150MB/sec cards" Micro SD cards that when tested are only reading at 80MB/sec if you're lucky ... you get what you pay for. 

UFS flash storage has other big advantages over older flash storage too, it's smaller and consumes less battery power. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 05 September 2023