iFixit: the Switch 2 Pro is a 'Piss-Poor Excuse For a Controller' (theverge.com) 23
iFixit has harsh words for Nintendo's $85 Switch 2 Pro controller, calling it a "piss-poor excuse for a controller" due to its difficult repairability, use of outdated drift-prone joysticks, and poor internal accessibility. The Verge reports: Opening the controller requires you to first forcefully remove a faceplate held in place by adhesive tape before a single screw is visible. But you'll need to extract several other parts and components, including the controller's mainboard, before its battery is even accessible. As previously revealed, the Pro 2 is still using older potentiometer-based joysticks that are prone to developing drift over time. They do feature a modular design that will potentially make them easier to swap with third-party Hall effect or TMR replacements, but reassembling the controller after that DIY upgrade will require you to replace all the adhesive tape you destroyed during disassembly. You can watch the full teardown on YouTube.
Remember? (Score:1)
Remember when Nintendo had the absolutely most durable controllers in existence, which you could legitimately use as a weapon?
womp womp
Re:Remember? (Score:4, Informative)
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The N64 controller had the shittiest everything Imaginable. GC wasn't much better, either, it was ergonomic for nobody. Wii was pretty bad too, you had to have an ergonomic condom for the wiimote, and the controller was too rounded. Since Famicom was kind of janky (though player 1 had a headphone jack) I'd say only NES and SNES were actually worth a crap. Neither one had any ergonomics, but neither did anyone else's controller until Genesis, Epyx aside.
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The N64 controller had the shittiest everything Imaginable.
Except load times. Those were nice.
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I dunno dude, you had to manually load the rumble motor into your controller. Ever other controller with rumble didn't need to load.
Nintendo has modpoints (Score:2)
Enjoy your drift, clowns
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The NES I played in the 90s had a terrible controller. Like, barely playable. D-pad not registering without some real muscle applied to it.
That was in Europe though. Not sure if they had different controllers there, or maybe the one I had was just worn out.
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That was in Europe though. Not sure if they had different controllers there, or maybe the one I had was just worn out.
It must have been worn out and/or dirty then. No controller in history has ever had a better D-pad than the NES. It was positive, precise, and reliable. You could also slam the controllers around, bounce them off the floor, throw them across the room or whatever (yes, I was an angry child. in my defense I played a lot of ninja gaiden) and they would keep on working.
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NES controllers had amazing dpads. Those worked perfectly. A lot of NES games are really rough to play on modern controllers because they were designed around the really high quality dpad.
Ergonomics weren't great because the controller was a box, but it worked really well. You just had a bad one.
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On the NES and SNES you just had to undo like 4-6 screws and clean the contact pads with some rubbing alcohol. I never had one actually legit fail, just get crusty.
Re: Remember? (Score:1)
I remember this is why I could no longer open up the secrets in goldeneye because I could no longer run full speed.
I replaced so if the analog sticks in my switch cons last year. Imma retired a screwdriver. The glue part makes dieing analog sticks less forgivable.
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No, but I remember the N64 controller having the shittiest joystick imaginable.
I remember when Mario Party 64 was released, and Nintendo sent a fingerless glove to everyone who purchased the game to avoid a lawsuit. A friend of mind injured the palm of his hand from a minigame that required rotating the joystick as fast as possible, and he wasn't the only one!
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Spoken like someone who missed the entire Atari 2600 / IntelliVision era. *shudder* And don't even mention the Atari 5200. There was absolutely no joy in that stick.
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Obvious (Score:3)
Watching that tear down video makes it obvious that Nintendo built this thing to be e-waste when it dies. The sheer amount of design fuckery is strong with this one.
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Everything is built to be e-waste when it dies. No current company builds their controllers to be actually repairable and most consumers are oblivious to the ability to repair equipment. No this doesn't look that hard to repair, the only complication at all appears to be a bit of adhesive which any teenager working at a repair shop basically expects to exist. As much as the video heaps shit on this controller it's a major improvement over the xbox controller. When you get drift on that one you need to reach
So much plastic, so many screws... WTF? (Score:2)
That has to be the most unnecessarily over-engineered controller I've ever seen, especially given its incredibly generic layout and function. Older controllers had a 2-piece clamshell design and worked just fine. What's with the need to glue on multiple face plates? Why low-profile thumbsticks when there's clearly tons of wasted space inside? Why spend so much money on the shell just to end up cheaping out on crappy potentiometers? Why make everything so modular with ribbon cables everywhere if it's im
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Older controllers had a 2-piece clamshell design and worked just fine.
Disagree, the older controllers creak and flex while gaming. You shouldn't fear screws. Screws are good. Screws are easy to remove, replace, and the consumer friendly option. The only real WTF here is the damn glued on faceplate.
Why make everything so modular with ribbon cables everywhere if it's impossible to access any of the internal parts?
This shows your lack of design understanding. The ribbon cables are there for easy of disassembly and to connect components that are structurally mounted to the clamshell rather than the PCB to the board. This is a good thing mechanically, good thing for consumer repairability and g
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And your post shows your lack of corporate understanding. Companies use ribbon cables like this because they function as booby traps for anyone opening the device. It's incredible easy to brick a part if there's tons of ultra fragile ribbon cables and connectors all over the place that will tear, snap, or kink the moment you so much as blink wrong during disassembly or reassembly.
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Err no. Sure everything looks like a conspiracy to you, but ribbon cables are the easiest way to transfer multi-core signals between parts. In the teardown video there's not a single booby trap.
By the way I'm sorry you outed yourself as having not watched the video and being clueless to what is discussed, but in this case there isn't a single ribbon cable that is a booby trap (even if your conspiracy was true) as 100% of them are visible and disconnectable prior to separating the components. The use of ribb
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To customize the controller. You might not realize this but special edition controllers are a thing. With glued faceplates, you can make the core controller then glue on the decorative piece afterwards.
With this design, NIntendo is probably trying to after the Xbox Design Studio that lets you do basic customizations to your controller, but likely add the capability of adding your own design to the plastics that can be printed on using pad stamping or hy
This video is just a whiny hit piece (Score:4, Informative)
Aside from the glued on face plate I see a controller that is held together by screws, easily disassembled, and unlike the competition can have it's shitty potentiometers replaced without relying on skill with a soldering iron. It's shitty that we're still using potentiometers in 2025, but this is definitely an improvement in repairability over the xbox controllers (can't comment on PS5, I've never repaired one of those).
As for the battery. That sounds shitty but I've never had a controller with potentiometers have the battery be the limiting factor. It's simple to just swap out the battery here when you fix the broken stick - which will fail first.