upvote
Every single laptop vendor deals with this. Ipads, desktops, you name it. Nintendo are simply not anywhere near industry baseline here.
reply
That is, Nintendo intentionally used a widely-used, well-specified standardised connector and protocol, and chose to make their implementation subtly non-compliant in several ways. And there is no discernible good reason to do so (as far as I know it’s not like they actually needed to do anything special, stock-standard, compliant USB-C would work perfectly fine).
reply
Exactly. It would be understandable if they took the connector and implemented something custom entirely. But they spent engineering effort on altering the official, already working spec, to subtly break it. This was completely intentional.
reply
IMHO, their USB-C-ish is frustrating. Same shape but not all chargers work. But on the flip side, understand what they're doing.

Nintendo is not making a USB-C computer, they're making a _product_ or a cohesive system.

They do not want you plugging in an arbitrary charger (which may not have the right wattage), don't want you laying the switch face up (nubs on the controllers getting in the way), face down (scratching the screen), plugging in a usb-c controller and dragging the spiderweb of wires off the entertainment center, or trying to use the touch screen while attached to a TV.

They wanted a vertical dock that managed airflow, charged at the appropriate rate, and guided you away from asking why you couldn't have some janky setup where you're trying to treat it like a gameboy advance (local screen simultaneous to big TV) being held by kindergarteners who pull the TV off the stand).

...so the dock is effectively a sacrificial buffer/safety system to prevent your switch from causing damage to your TV.

reply
> They do not want you plugging in an arbitrary charger (which may not have the right wattage)

Why not? The standard deals with such a situation fine… There is zero danger, the PD contract wouldn’t be able to negotiate, so the system could just indicate with an LED or a message on the screen or something to show it’s not going to be able to start charging without a bigger charger. This is literally a solved problem.

reply
Aren't these issues that Nintendo has to solve to maintain compliance with modern compatibility laws, rather than roadblocks for them to use to inhibit consumer ease-of-use? If the wattage is wrong then the Switch 2 can say that and either slow charge or not charge at all. The other issues are all purely user preference.
reply
Because they are Nintendo, that's why.

DS Lite famously had a silly proprietary connector for charging, which required their special wall charger... which was literally a 5V charger. It could have been mini/micro USB from the beginning, but no.

reply
> doesn’t justify the development and manufacturing costs

At Nintendo scale, I bet it does though

reply
deleted
reply