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.
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You can’t wait for a few minutes of charging? Go make a sandwich or something
The Switch 2 BETTER have this feature…
Or else what? You’ll still buy it.
It’s basically a protection thing that some mobile devices and laptops do. Essentially if it booted before that it would probably immediately shut off right after it booted if power were disconnected. It charges to a point where power can be disconnected for a few minutes and you’ll be okay, then it boots
Hopefully the switch 2 has fast charging
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.
Isn’t it still USB-C, though? An old laptop was just an example, people have definitely also tried old chargers for their docks
It is USB-C, but the part that goes from the dock to the Switch will always be a constant. If the dock itself is not receiving enough power, it (shouldn’t) power the Switch at all.
I have heard it happening with power banks. Unless it’s a “good” one, it will charge Switch slower than the power it uses, so it still drains battery, but slower.
Hmm isn’t this just conventional behavior for all tech? Like I If you get your phone’s battery to a flat zero, your going to need to wait a bit for it to have at least some minimal charge to just turn on. The same with laptops, tablets and any other handheld devices. So why would switch (or switch 2) be any different?
I’m not a switch expert but can think of a reason why it might do this.
The system might show it’s battery level to you as 100% to 0% when it might actually be draining from 100% to 5%. That last 5% might be used as a sort of internal Uninterruptible Power System .
When the system boots up it might be doing some things where a power failure could have severe consequences like bricking the unit if the plug was pulled out and there was no battery.
The system might use some swap space like storage or have some key variables kept in RAM which needs to be written out to non-volatile memory before the chips are powered down.
For example let’s say it hibernates and it doesn’t or incorrectly writes the wrong instructions pointer address When the system poweres up, it might try and execute game data instead of instructions and not recover.
Nintendo wouldn’t want to handle heaps of complaints of bricked systems due to exceptional circumstances like a power outage if it let the switch play off mains alone.
That’s my theory, I could be wrong and I’m sorry it’s frustrating you.
I would seriously question the competence of Nintendo developers if their system cannot survive an unexpected shutdown. Computers losing power unexpectedly has been a possibility for server and desktop computers since those form factors were first created.
Sure, maybe some clever code cowboy decided that since the system will always have a battery, their OS can be optimized around never losing power. That reasoning should have been rejected, with prejudice, in a code review. Batteries fail and the older they are, the less charge they hold. Even if the battery is still good, the connection between it and the rest of the device can wear out or come loose.
I wasn’t trying to say that fault tolerant practices like journaling file systems wouldn’t be used, but to use an analogy, the system knows that when it’s low on power and tired to the point it needs a recharge, it can stop and lie down deliberately rather than keep running until it drops and maybe fall over and hit it’s head.
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.
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.
Yeah, but there isn’t much of a difference in this. Power can go out, or someone can just pick it up again, so if it doesn’t have enough power to properly go in sleep/hibernate mode that can cause issue, so you have to design for those possibilities.
Anyways, I wasn’t seriously arguing about that, my point was just that different people / consumers generally want different things.
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.
Ideally, yes but I don’t think people want that. It’s really hard to deplete your battery as much as OP did. The issue here is that at low charge you get inaccurate measurements so you’d have to provision a lot of battery capacity and people wouldn’t buy such devices when the issue being fixed is so minor.
For “family” devices its a feature that many parents would be happy to use.
I enable the battery health options on my kid’s tablets, I’m happy to sacrifice a little bit of operating time in year one if it means I still have “near new” operating time in year two and on.
Pretty sure it’s a feature of the larger AC/battery controller, not the battery itself.
It’s more to do with chemistry and that voltage drops off sharply below 20% of charge. Once it’s there it’s also more prone to be affected by environmental factors like temperature making it even harder to measure.
A company that’s going to cut 20% battery capacity in a consumer electronics is going to lose money on sales. There are industrial solutions that do this but Nintendo makes toys that play games.
Nintendo kinda lookin like Apple right about now
How so?
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.
It does at least work fine if you have no battery at all. Just a bit dangerous, gotta keep an eye on your power cord
