So I just got home from work, and I was playing Nintendo Switch at work. Well, the battery died.
So I get get home, plop that bad boy in the dock. Turn on the TV, turn on my controller, and…TV has no signal, controller isn’t connecting.
I walk over, and press and hold the power button while it’s in the dock, and it’s not doing anything. I pull it out of the dock, and press the power button. It’s showing me a blank screen with a red battery symbol to indicate no battery.
Yeah, that’s fine. The dock has external power. Use that. Except, no. It’s not. I need to wait for it to charge for a few minutes. At least enough to turn it on. THEN I can run off of wall power.
I understand the BATTERY is dead. I get that. But why can’t you just draw from AC if it’s in the dock? I don’t even care if it’s charging right now. I just want to play. It can charge later when I go to sleep, and it’s just in the dock all night.
I want the switch 2 to just be drop and play, even with a dead battery. Bad enough I need to worry about if my controller is charged!
Can we bring back the WiiU controller battery life? I’m pretty sure that thing is still charged since the 1970s. Which doesn’t even make sense, but it still somehow goes to show how long that controllers battery lasted.
Maybe it’s to discourage you from discharging battery this much because if you go that far you’re damaging it.
if you go that far you’re damaging it.
If that’s true to any significant degree that’s an even bigger problem.
The device should be switching off with something to 5% charge remaining to prevent battery damage.
It’s the same for every Li-Ion battery powered device and I don’t think Nintendo is going to R&D new battery tech anytime soon. You’d have to sacrifice too much of a capacity to prevent it so it’s easier to just try no to go below 20% of charge. Then, if you really need to go below you can limit it to cases where you can’t just pause and resume later.
You’d have to sacrifice too much of a capacity to prevent it so it’s easier to just try no to go below 20% of charge.
But that’s the thing, you are sacrificing the capacity its just that you are being asked to make that decision manually each and every time. They know how the drain/recharge cycles effect the battery so they could set the min/max cutoffs to optimum values.
For SSDs we expect them to over provision the storage and consider the increased longevity a measurable benefit. I don’t see why batteries should be any different.
Pretty sure it’s a feature of the larger AC/battery controller, not the battery itself.
This whole post is about a person not wanting Switch to set any threshold, and let him start even at 0% battery. 😀
Not really, my reading is that they want it to bypass the battery when docked.
Their take is that the battery power is irrelevant once it has an external power supply.
The Switch 2 BETTER have this feature…
Or else what? You’ll still buy it.
Nintendo kinda lookin like Apple right about now
Apple laptops will refuse to start if the battery has no charge, even if they are plugged into the wall.
There may or may not be good reasons for this, but it’s a point of contention and different from how most other laptops work.
The switch has a lot of similarities with phone hardware, but in a different form factor.
Almost all phones work like this, in that they are mobile-first devices which are designed to depend on the battery.
A major reason for this design choice is power stability.
The switch (just like a phone) can charge off any USB power supply, even really low power ones. The power coming in might be enough to slowly charge, but not enough to keep up when you do the most demanding tasks, like playing a graphically intensive game.
For that reason, the switch requires some charge in the battery, so that if the power draw spikes too much for the charger then the battery takes up the slack and things keep working nicely, rather than unexpected crashing or other oddities.
In the end, demanding the battery has at least a little charge to run is basically a safety feature to ensure that you have a good experience, and the switch does not die in unexpected ways.
Back when phones still had removable batteries, it was possible to use a battery-less phone that was hooked up to a charger.
I can’t imagine the Switch would ever be in a situation where the dock would be providing less power than the device needs to stay charged.
Most people (especially kids) don’t know anything about power or USB. I can’t imagine it’s rare for someone to try to play their switch while it’s plugged into a USB 2.0 port on an old laptop
Sure, but we’re talking about the dock, which is its own device that requires a minimum power threshold to work.
You can’t wait for a few minutes of charging? Go make a sandwich or something
