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Nintendo Confirms EU‑Only Switch 2 Revision With User‑Replaceable Batteries
(www.extremetech.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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Maintaining two product lines simply out of spite really is just such a Nintendo thing to do.
I have never and will never pay for a Nintendo product because of shit like this. Doesn't mean you can't play Nintendo games though 🏴☠️
Fuck Nintendo.
yep.
I've not given Nintendo money for a long ass time, because of their idiotic insistence on choosing the most selfish, customer hating path at every fork in the road they come to.
Likewise, Nintendo has now joined Sony for me in my Never Another Red Cent category. I've got an entire bookcase full of Nintendo games and systems ranging from the NES all the way up to the OG Switch but it ends there. It's guaranteed that they will never shape up, so I'll never give them any more money.
Sony was so close to me diving head first into their PC gaming ecosystem, cause there were a lot of games i really wanted to get into, when they pulled the "HAHA SURPRISE, ALL THOSE GAMES YOU'VE ALREADY BOUGHT AND PLAYED? NOW YOU HAVE TO HAVE A PLAYSTATION ACCOUNT FOR THEM BECAUSE WE SAID SO!" and basically guaranteed I'll never own another playstation product for the rest of my life.
For me it was the music CD rootkit thing, and trying to sue people for watching a particular Youtube video. Sony has already been on my no fly list for a very long time.
I forgot about the rootkit thing.
And wait, what? suing over watching a youtube video? I never heard about this
When Sony was suing George Hotz over his PS3 jailbreak video, they also tried to bully Youtube (or possibly Google, I forget if this was post-Google acquisition) into revealing the IPs and identities of everyone who watched the video so they could attempt to sue them for "piracy" also. Obviously they did not succeed, but the fact that they tried says a lot.
Probably would have succeeded if it was in a japanese court against a Japanese company.
Which I think its why these Japanese companies specifically feel emboldened to do stupid shit like that.
I've also never paid Nintendo for any of their games, but that's because they don't interest me
Yeah, tbf I'm in the same boat. But their anti consumer philosophy is causation for my philosophy about making extra effort not to give them a cent.
Seriously, just do the right thing. Goddamn
The right thing costs 1% more can't waste that
Probably costs .1% more.
It's probably cheaper to do the right thing. It'd allow them to have a single product line, rather than two. However, it'd mean they can't screw over customers and sell them replacements, so it'd cost them in additional sales.
It's the Apple approach: Implement consumer-friendly policies only in regions that require it by law. Apple mostly do it with software though, for example only allowing third-party app stores in EU and Japan.
Plenty of US companies do something similar with subscriptions too. California mandates that any subscription you create online must also be cancellable online, and so some companies (like New York Times, SiriusXM, gyms) only show their simple online cancelation flow to Californians. Everyone else must jump through hoops like use live chat, call them, cancel in person, etc.
While that’s not great, at least Apple’s software can be changed later. How do you retroactively add a battery to a console?
When Apple was forced by the EU to use USB-C, they didn’t make a non-US and a US phone; everyone got the same port.
The midlife revision will probably just have a user-replaceable battery for all regions to simplify things.
Then again, it’s Nintendo.
Nintendo makes the first version of all of their products deliberately mid just so the second version can be considered to be an upgrade, when everybody else would just consider the second version to be what they should have made from the beginning.
It's like the OLED switch, why didn't they just make the first version OLED? There hasn't been a significant cost reduction in that area lately, so it's not as if it's suddenly cheaper to put one in.
OLED costs more than LCD, significantly so, so to keep costs down they used LCD. Pretty simple really. OLED also has various issues that LCD doesn’t have that mean it won’t last anywhere near as long as an LCD screen does.
I love OLED screens, but after my $3k LG OLED tv started showing the PUBG UI every time there was red on the screen where the UI was, I’ve switched back to LCD for gaming and am not regretting it.
Making a stock version followed by a premium version isn't that odd. There are plenty of things Nintendo does with their systems that I generally agree with you on, but OLED vs LCD is not it.
Not just spite. It also proves they profit more from proprietary repairs than it costs to maintain both production lines.
Being anti consumer is more profitable than making 2 product lines. Remember if you live in other countries not in EU you are inferior because Nintendo just told you so.
Well, Sega did the same with the Megadrive and the various shapes of the cartridges to prevent you from playing games that came from another country (but yes, Nintendo did the same with the Super Nintendo).
Nintendo did that first. Not just with the Super Nintendo, but the original NES vs. the Famicom.
There was kinda-sorta a justifiable reason for that in the sense that different countries at that time had different television standards with frame rates and vertical line counts which the systems of the era were inherently tied to, and sticking an NTSC game in a PAL system or vise-versa even if it fit and would play would not produce an optimal result. (Sometimes it still didn't — ask people about the Street Fighter games in PAL regions, for instance.)
Now that the world is all on the same digital TV standards, region locking can be done in software.