The OLED switch was nice, but it’s what the switch should’ve been from day one.
The processor was long in the tooth and the joycons were unacceptably flawed on day one. The OLED switch changed none of these things and it still frustrates me a lot that people weren’t more critical of it tbh.
Yeah they’d fill should’ve upgraded the processor for the OLED switch, and I totally agree about the joycon situation. I was more talking about the screen, Nintendo easily could’ve made the first Gen switch OLED but they didn’t.
I feel the price was already a little high at launch (since they are adamant about making a profit on hardware as opposed to Sony/Microsoft who sell at a loss) so the addition of a more expensive screen would’ve probably pushed the price too high tbh. It was 2017, OLED’s were still pretty new and very expensive.
LCD was fine. Locked 60 Hz refresh rate made no sense whatsoever. Even shitty laptops can dip down to 40 Hz, and that’d make dodgy framerates less stuttery. But the Switch is Nvidia hardware. There’s no excuse to not at least support 120 Hz polling to flip framebuffers.
Nintendo would have solidified the design and specs of the SoC and committed to a bulk contract for them just before we saw some big leaps in hardware; specifically in GPU and ARM SoCs, memory bandwidth and PCIe bus performance, and chip die resolution.
Think about where mobile processors were in 2014; it’s been almost 9 years. Think about where Apple silicon is now (also an ARM SoC platform). We’re truly “living in the future”.
Since the products were already in consumer hands as these innovations where happening, it was too late to change anything. It’s a rock and a hard place; especially for Nintendo who caters to so many casual enjoyers - if you upgrade the hardware, you’re gonna need to do another launch. The alternative would be that people with older switches wouldn’t be able to run newer games. You also don’t want to anger your customers by saying “remember that $400 you spent 3 years ago? Yeah you’re gonna need to go ahead and give us another $400”. Additionally, if they had done that, we’d probably be complaining about THAT machine being underpowered now. The Switch was selling like hotcakes regardless, they weren’t going to disrupt that revenue. Money talks and the world told Nintendo what they wanted, whether they meant to or not.
Now that even 1st party titles are struggling on the system, the writing is on the wall, the tech has improved massively, and consumers are warming to the idea of a new console, it makes sense that Nintendo would have been doing the legwork to be at the point when suppliers are leaking info, when investor calls subtly reveal dates when at a minimum we’ll get our first official info, etc. I bet they’ll start shipping dev kits in the fall (if they haven’t already) if all this info is accurate.
The processor was long in the tooth and the joycons were unacceptably flawed on day one. The OLED switch changed none of these things and it still frustrates me a lot that people weren’t more critical of it tbh.
Yeah they’d fill should’ve upgraded the processor for the OLED switch, and I totally agree about the joycon situation. I was more talking about the screen, Nintendo easily could’ve made the first Gen switch OLED but they didn’t.
I feel the price was already a little high at launch (since they are adamant about making a profit on hardware as opposed to Sony/Microsoft who sell at a loss) so the addition of a more expensive screen would’ve probably pushed the price too high tbh. It was 2017, OLED’s were still pretty new and very expensive.
LCD was fine. Locked 60 Hz refresh rate made no sense whatsoever. Even shitty laptops can dip down to 40 Hz, and that’d make dodgy framerates less stuttery. But the Switch is Nvidia hardware. There’s no excuse to not at least support 120 Hz polling to flip framebuffers.
Nintendo would have solidified the design and specs of the SoC and committed to a bulk contract for them just before we saw some big leaps in hardware; specifically in GPU and ARM SoCs, memory bandwidth and PCIe bus performance, and chip die resolution.
Think about where mobile processors were in 2014; it’s been almost 9 years. Think about where Apple silicon is now (also an ARM SoC platform). We’re truly “living in the future”.
Since the products were already in consumer hands as these innovations where happening, it was too late to change anything. It’s a rock and a hard place; especially for Nintendo who caters to so many casual enjoyers - if you upgrade the hardware, you’re gonna need to do another launch. The alternative would be that people with older switches wouldn’t be able to run newer games. You also don’t want to anger your customers by saying “remember that $400 you spent 3 years ago? Yeah you’re gonna need to go ahead and give us another $400”. Additionally, if they had done that, we’d probably be complaining about THAT machine being underpowered now. The Switch was selling like hotcakes regardless, they weren’t going to disrupt that revenue. Money talks and the world told Nintendo what they wanted, whether they meant to or not.
Now that even 1st party titles are struggling on the system, the writing is on the wall, the tech has improved massively, and consumers are warming to the idea of a new console, it makes sense that Nintendo would have been doing the legwork to be at the point when suppliers are leaking info, when investor calls subtly reveal dates when at a minimum we’ll get our first official info, etc. I bet they’ll start shipping dev kits in the fall (if they haven’t already) if all this info is accurate.
Ehhhhh I get that but my main gripes are 1) the joy cons and 2) literally no changes for the OLED