this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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I mean, it's clearly not meant to last decades given the battery situation.
You'd think, but I have Nintendo handhelds from the 2000s that still hold a charge fine, and so does my launch Switch 1, which is about a decade old.
The Switch 2 is the first one of these they ship with a battery care charge mode, too, which is interesting. I think as they abandon their old single-threaded, no-multitasking design, for a more mobile-like architecture they're also having to make similar adjustments to their battery management, so it'll be interesting to see if the Switch 2 battery struggles with degradation more than older devices. It sure is more power hungry, and it does get hotter so you'd expect more charge cycles per year and less durability. It's going to be an open question for a while.
Still not the worst battery health in a Nintendo product, no matter what happens. That'll always be the WiiU controller. That sytem laster just a couple of years and I still had to replace the battery for an aftermarket one and ended up using it plugged in anyway.
The problem with the battery is that it's glued in and requires basically destroying the foam it sits on, with no available replacement for the foam or specifications given AFAIK.
Also, if we're just talking anecdotes here, I have at least two Nintendo devices from the 2000s that ended up with swollen batteries. This has actually reminded me that I might need to check again.
Fundamentally true of everything with a battery. For old Nintendo devices that just... hold on to that charge forever I also strongly recommend pulling them out of mothballs every year or six months and giving them a full charge cycle, just in case. Gives you a reason to revisit old games, while you're at it.
I wanna say they did the foam thing on Switch 1 (never needed to replace it, so I'm not positive, speaking from memory), but these things are typically popular enough you get aftermarket replacements specifically built to fit, so I'm not too worried about getting a replacement down the line, even with Nintendo not providing the requried documentation (but seriously, they have to for legal reasons, so they better get to it).
I'm more concerned about getting to the thing in the first place on this one. Plus the battery life is worse, so there's conceivable a market for larger capacity replacements.
This conversation reminds me I need to swap a suspicious battery on an old Samsung S10 I had in storage and I'm NOT looking forward to dealing with that, either. Maybe I'll just dunk it in alcohol and hope for the best...