[benoau]

Amazes me they don't just sell it like that everywhere because it sounds a lot like a product improvement...

> The revised products will be available on a rolling basis in territories where Nintendo of Europe conducts business, either directly or through a distributor, namely: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.

[rickdeckard]

According to their latest fiscal report [0], Europe sales-volume of Switch2 is ~24% of the total global sales volume.

The change surely eats into their margin per device, so they prefer to keep the higher margin for the rest of the world and recalculate their margin for europe.

However interesting: "The Americas" sells 34% of all Switch2 in the world [0]. I wouldn't expect the US to mandate the same changes, but if e.g. Canada or Brazil also demand replaceable batteries, it could push the needle to making it a default HW-feature of Switch2...

[0] https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2026/260203_2e.pdf

[square_usual]

The higher margin is mostly coming from assembly costs, right? I can't imagine it comes from the actual cost of the battery being so much higher. I hope that once they start pushing these out and retool factories for them they can sell them more broadly.

[rickdeckard]

The lower margin for the new variant you mean?

From my experience, it comes from costs generated by:

1. Additional R&D-work and QA for the modification

2. New supply-chain deals for lower-volume components

Current sales-volume of Europe is only a quarter of the global volume, so price-negotiation is based on a much lower total volume-forecast.

Even if not, Battery prices today are ~15% higher than in 2024 (I expect Nintendo signed the supply-deal in late 2024), it'll be hard for Nintendo to cancel their existing supply-contract before fulfilling it (!), move to a different component AND get the same/lower price.

--> Better to sell other regions as-is, fulfill the contract and hope for a better climate in a year.

3. Tooling/Assembly (Ramp-Up costs, different processes, QA,...)

4. Re-certification of HW for relevant bodies in that region (Europe is quite lean on this, CE-certification is simple compared to US FTC/FCC)

I can almost hear the conversation with Nintendo of America CEO about covering 1/3 of the cost to get the same SKU and him simply responding "No, we just raised the prices because of component-cost increase, we wait for the HW-refresh in 2H/2027"

I wouldn't be surprised if they plan to unify the SKU again with a premium "Switch 2 OLED", offsetting the additional costs, preserving the margin and having an additional selling-point...

[mcphage]

> Amazes me they don't just sell it like that everywhere because it sounds a lot like a product improvement...

I'm not so sure. The first laptop I bought, a Titanium Powerbook, had replaceable batteries. And even better than that: you could hot-swap them while the laptop was running on battery power, and the laptop wouldn't even shut off. It felt leagues ahead of even modern replaceable battery functionality, and honestly? After owning that laptop for years, I felt like I just wasted my money with that additional battery.

Part of it, I'm sure, was that I didn't have an external charger to charge the battery not currently in the laptop. But on the whole, it just didn't feel like it was actually worthwhile, and when Apple stopped shipping replaceable batteries, I've never missed it.

(Hot swapping the batteries really was awesome, though)

[InsideOutSanta]

I had an Apple laptop that had two bays, one on the left and one on the right. Usually, you'd have the battery on the left and the CD drive on the right. But for lots of people, battery life was more important than a CD drive on a laptop, so you could double your battery life by putting in a battery on both sides.

Tech used to be fricken cool :-)

[toyg]

Compulsory Apple-defending post is compulsory.

Non-replaceable batteries are worse for consumers and worse for the environment. The fact that you "do not miss" a better world, does not mean it is not better.

[ssl-3]

I have an old ThinkPad as my only laptop. It came to me used, with an aftermarket battery.

That battery was great for a couple of years before it started to get wonky, so I replaced it with a different aftermarket battery.

This process took zero tools. It took less time to swap in a new battery than it did for me to write this comment. Anyone can do it; it is not an arduous procedure.

What was the added environmental cost here? Some "single-use" plastics that lasted for years?

[endemic]

> Non-replaceable batteries

Most batteries are replaceable. The difference is the level of effort involved.

[bluescrn]

Replacing a Switch 1 battery really annoyed me. No problem with tiny screws and fiddly disassembly.

Big problem with the truly excessive amount and strength of adhesive holding the old one in place, and having a real struggle to remove it (even after trying with IPA and dental floss)

[mcphage]

> The fact that you "do not miss" a better world, does not mean it is not better.

In the abstract, yeah, it's better. But the extra battery cost me a lot of money, and I did not feel it was money well spent.

[wqaatwt]

Easily swappable batteries do have significant downsides, you either need to compromise on capacity or form factor.

Of course that doesn’t mean they should be hard to replace with some tools and effort.

To be fair back in those days laptops only lasted on battery power for a few hours at most (also old batteries had a very short lifetime compared to modern ones) so being able to swap it was an actually useful feature.

[NDlurker]

Phones used to work like that too. I think all my feature phones and first Android phone worked if it was plugged in with the battery removed.

[mcphage]

The thing about the TI powerbook was, it didn't have to be plugged in to hot swap the battery. You could do it when running on battery power. (It had a tiny internal battery, that could run it for like 20-30 seconds, so long as the screen was closed).

It did also run when plugged in with the battery removed, which is good 'cause the battery eventually failed. So this way I can still run it.

[NDlurker]

Oh! Cool!

[thih9]

Quite a few of these aren't EU members, some aren't even in Europe; do we know why they were added? e.g.: Switzerland or United Kingdom; but also Oman or United Arab Emirates.

[weberer]

For logistics reasons, a lot of companies operate a EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) division. That probably applies to one of their suppliers.

[suddenlybananas]

It's everywhere Nintendo of Europe (the subsidiary in the EU) operates.

[thih9]

This makes sense - thanks!

[rtkwe]

It's easier for Nintendo of Europe to switch over everyone than to stock and supply 2 versions of every product. Also I'd bet most of their sales come from the EU countries where the replaceable battery requirement is forcing this new SKU deployment anyways.

[yokoprime]

Norway is in the ECC together with Iceland, but for some reason Iceland is not on the list where these SKUs will be available.

[rickdeckard]

That's probably because Iceland is not an official Sales-territory of Nintendo, it's handled by Bergsala AB, a swedish distributor which serves the market there.

[Ylpertnodi]

Storage, and distribution costs.

[Grombobulous]

It’s infuriating that it’s not just the default, especially for a game console where the majority of profit is coming from software sales.

Every Switch that becomes unplayable where fixing it costs more than a $20 battery replacement is a console that is not buying games from the Nintendo eShop.

[khurs]

Or a new switch being bought by the parent for the distressed child

[brookst]

Shorter battery life is just fine

[Grombobulous]

For sure, and I don’t find carting a spare external battery around horrendous…it just seems like a non-water resistant device like the switch should have an easy battery replacement.

For one thing, Nintendo loves selling overpriced accessories.

[orloffm]

I would prefer the current versions without anything replaceable. I have the Switch bought on day 1 and a Pro Controller which is 9 years old. Yes, the Switch was mostly used docked, but the battery is last thing failing there, it rather has issues with the fan, the screen scratches etc. The controller works perfectly and I charge it once a month. The replaceable battery would only make it less solid.

The biggest Switch issue by far is joystick drift on joycons. I've replaced 3 on my Switch 2 already and we have the same issue on the new Switch 2 in the office.

[benoau]

EU also forced Nintendo to provide lifetime free repairs on drifty joycons since Nintendo chooses not to address the issue.

https://www.euroconsumers.org/game-over-for-faulty-nintendo-...

[bluescrn]

My day 1 Switch battery was definitely significantly degraded when I did a DIY battery swap a couple of years back.

Battery longevity varies based on usage patterns and likely other factors (temperature?), but it's normal to notice a significant reduction in capacity within 4-5 years.

And the amount of adhesive holding the old battery in made replacing it an unnecessarily hard and actually dangerous (risk of battery fire due to physical damage) process.