i’m not gonna lie, the idea of a cheaper switch where the joycons don’t accidentally desync every hour is kind of an appealing prospect
i play it on handheld most of the time anyways, but l’d still love to be able to use the big TV for parties and couch multiplayer
this seems like a “second switch for the household” kind of thing
“second switch for the rich kid” kind of thing
Don’t quite understand it all but hackers seem pretty confident that besides the new Lite model the regular Switch might be getting a slight upgrade at some point
A bit better battery life and a maybe a bit better performance but not really a PS4-Pro upgrade.
Okay, this is the best recommendation. This game rules.
I got Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle for $20. yay
New longer life battery Switch is real. Shows up in about a month (“mid-August”).
4.5-9 hours instead of 2.5-6.5
Releasing for $299.99 also. Everything else looks identical?
Makes me wonder if I should’ve waited 2 months, since the other model might get price dropped? Oh well, I got in on ground floor SMM2 and that’s all that matters.
More exciting to me personally is the introduction of of neon purple/neon orange and blue/neon yellow Joycon packages. I was hoping maybe to never buy another set of joycons, but I kinda love that purple/orange package (might prefer a blue and purple or orange instead, but still).
Huge wasted opportunity to make the orange Joycon the left one, to facilitate an orange + green combu
it sure would be nice if Nintendo gave me, the idiot launch purchaser, some kind of recourse in getting into New Switch With XL Battery Life without coughing up 300 bucks
I think that’s probably a 7nm X1
Used to you could order any combination of colors from nintendo’s website.
huh!
This says it’s probably 16nm. It was >20nm before, I gather. 7nm only goes to more profitable products.
lol @ the dorks who can’t wrap their minds around why this exists and why it’s not a for real hardware guts upgrade
gamers just can’t understand why anyone would make anything that isn’t tailor made for their tastes
please nintendo, do not do us with a “> 
<” market split like you did with the 3DS
at least not till the switch has been out for like 5 years anyway
the 16nm process is super refined at this point anyway (Nvidia has been marketing the RTX GPUs as “12nm” this whole time when it’s clearly the same node), and TSMC “20nm” was, I think, always a refinement of 28nm because it was much worse than even first-gen 16nm on paper, so a doubling of battery life from a single stepping as long as there’s no performance improvement whatsoever I guess isn’t that inconceivable
the problem with the 3DS is that the hardware was genuinely terrible from the start, trying to ride an already cheap ARM chipset from like 2011(?) for six years was simply not possible if you wanted anyone to go to the trouble of developing for it (even compared to the original DS which was basically fine for six years). The switch was vastly better specced from the get go – years of work from both Nintendo and Nvidia pointed them toward making a single powerful handheld that was also affordable and could do TV duty if needed. If they’d made something that could do slightly better framerates when developers cared to support it like the PS4 Pro I don’t think it would’ve hurt anyone, but they’re in a much, much better place now anyway.
I’m completely fine with this being a battery life upgrade
how much of a difference can a graphics upgrade in a system like this really make? if you want something cutting edge there are expensive consoles for that or just build a PC. we’re in an era where relatively inexpensive graphics hardware is more than good enough for most games’ visual needs if you aren’t trying to make some kind of vivid hyper realistic immersive experience. and you aren’t going to get that on the switch no matter what kind of incremental improvements are possible now.
I guess the only case for it is like unreal engine 4 games that people want to port, since that seems to be still be a struggle on the switch as is, but I’m happier without there being a performance split like there is with the other two major consoles or the 3DS.
yeah the important thing is that it can actually run contemporary middleware, it doesn’t need an upgrade until it can’t
The biggest reason I’d want an upgrade is to extend the lifespan of easy indie ports to the system, although we don’t seem to be having big problems yet
Vita started showing issues with this around 2015 and it was a real shame
also while I don’t disagree with this it always feels this way toward the end of a console generation, this may not seem true anymore by like 2022
but this console generation isn’t going to “end” the way the others did because Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are probably going to be sticking with compatible architectures indefinitely at this point so the baseline target for indie and small-budget stuff might not move up as quickly as it has in the past
by 2022 I imagine the switch could realistically be fitted with a much more substantial upgrade tho
and I’m still not convinced the next generation of playstation/xbox consoles are going to be that dramatic of a leap. you even kind of have to squint to notice the difference between late gen ps3 and early gen ps4 games. I remember firing up bloodborne for the first time, it was just kind of pleasant how it had better lighting and post processing and stuff but nothing about it felt revelatory or even like a dramatic departure from visual quality that I had gotten used to from the past gen. and I suspect that a lot of the reason 8th gen console games look better is because of improved middleware and game engines more than the hardware itself. obviously those two things are not independent of each other but still.