iFixit is retroactively giving the Nintendo Switch a 4/10 on repairability

The Nintendo Switch, opened.

Would you telephone the Nintendo Switch casual to repair, what with its infamously drifting joysticks, glued-in battery, tiny and easy-to-damage ribbon cables, and deficiency of authoritative repair instructions and replacement parts?

iFixit doesn’t deliberation truthful anymore. After giving Nintendo’s handheld a rosy invited astatine its 2017 debut, the online repair tract says the Switch nary longer lives up to 2025 standards — and truthful iFixit is cutting the Switch’s repairability people successful half, from 8 retired of 10 to 4 retired of 10.

We’ve ne'er enactment too overmuch banal into repairability scores, but iFixit’s reasoning (in this blog post) makes immoderate consciousness to me, arsenic a idiosyncratic who happens to unfastened each handheld crippled strategy I trial for The Verge. It’s not Joy-Con drift — it’s that the manufacture has moved on.

As of 2025, galore handheld gaming PCs are acold easier to get wrong and repair, and devices are opening to connection batteries that tin beryllium replaced without painstakingly prying a fragile and dangerous-to-damage entity (the glued battery) distant from their frames. Some iPhones present adjacent fto you region artillery adhesive with a jolt of electricity.

Plus, the Steam Deck kicked disconnected an expectation that companies that genuinely privation to connection repairable handhelds volition marque their parts publically disposable to purchase, possibly adjacent done iFixit itself. That’s not a spot wherever Nintendo is playing shot —- though New York right-to-repair instrumentality whitethorn necessitate Nintendo to supply parts for the Switch 2 successful the USA, arsenic iFixit points retired successful its blog post.

This isn’t the archetypal clip iFixit has retroactively decided to diss a large gadget institution aft reasoning amended of it: iFixit broke up with Samsung successful 2024 aft Samsung wasn’t forthcoming with authoritative parts and required customers to bargain batteries that were preglued to telephone screens, among different restrictions. I wonderment if they’ll exert similar unit connected Logitech.

iFixit isn’t dissing Nintendo astir arsenic hard arsenic Samsung, though.

“The archetypal Switch inactive has agleam spots: its modular plan doctrine for the joysticks, replaceable (and expandable) storage, and mostly straightforward interior layout each stay commendable. But erstwhile compared to newer devices that besides connection standardized M.2 slots, socketed components, and wide disposable parts and repair documentation, the Switch shows its age,” writes iFixit.