Nintendo wants hefty fee to repair Switch’s seemingly common cracked plastic fault

[VampDude]

Via: VG247

A poll conducted by Nintendo-dedicated site Nintendo Life has found that 20 percent of over 1000 users polled had seen their Nintendo Switch develop cracks in its plastic around the fan exhaust – and Nintendo repair costs aren’t exactly cheap.

Nintendo Life decided to conduct the poll after members of their staff experienced the issue of cracks emerging in the Switch around the machine’s fan exhaust. The cracks emerge as tiny hair-line cracks, and the site speculates that it’s due to the heat the Switch kicks out from this port, the primary ventilation area on Switch hardware. You can see some of the cracks in the photo below, snapped by Nintendo Life’s editor.



This story also caught our eye on VG247, as a few of us have also experienced cracking in this exact same place on our Switch consoles. I’d honestly chalked the cracking around my exhaust grill down to natural wear and tear, but the sheer number of reports and photographs of practically identical cracks on other machines now has us pondering if in fact there’s something more to it, and if the plastic used on the Switch just simply isn’t up to the task of handling the heat kicked out by the machine when it’s running heftier games.

What’s worse for fans is that if this issue occurs Nintendo appears to regard it as accidental damage, with readers of Nintendo Life showing the site correspondence with Nintendo support where they make clear the company considers the issuer the result of accidental damage and thus not covered under the standard warranty. As a result Nintendo UK are charging anywhere between £150 and £180 to repair the issue – a good two thirds of the price of the Switch itself. Ouch.

“After checking in with the European team we can confirm that we haven’t received a notable number of consumer inquiries on this topic,” Nintendo said to Nintendo Life in a statement. The results of Nintendo Life’s poll and the sheer number of photos sent to them of near-identical cracks suggests at least a design weakness if not an outright fault, however.

The Nintendo DS Lite suffered a similar cracking plastic issue around the hinge, but back then Nintendo would replace machines impacted by that issue at no cost. Has your Switch developed any of these cracks or problems? Let us know in the comments below.

[Shrygue]

Jesus Christ, £180 is frankly a major rip-off. You might as well buy the tri-wing screwdriver, front housing and even a new digitizer for a fraction of the price - perhaps no more than £30-40, maybe less even. Sure you'd have to put some effort to sort it and ensure not get dust inside between the digitizer and LCD but disassembly and reassembly shouldn't be too hard to do.

[VampDude]

Disassembly of the Switch is relatively easy, which any disassembly should remove the thermal paste and swap out for pads because generally with the paste it's a hassle to reapply after every opening, where the pads can just be carefully moved and re-seated. I personally believe that Nintendo didn't address the heating pipe/exhaust issues with the Switch before launching, which the console drastically overheats when it's docked (causing some consoles to curve last year).

Re-shelling the Switch comes in two forms, of which the original housing is cheap (£9 on eBay). Or there's the completely custom coloured housings, which costs more and is possibly made with better plastic. If my Switch decided to crack, I'd go for the complete custom overhaul of both the console and Joy-cons, costing no more than £45.

From when people were saying that the dock was scratching their screens on the first week of the Switch being available (I'm a day 9 owner - so I read and observed), I've never placed my Switch in the dock for gaming, which I'm guessing everyone who has warped or cracked consoles are native to using their docks, while I grew accustomed to the WiiU controller screen and played with the television turned off, adopting this habit with the Switch and I've had no issues.

[Shrygue]

My console ended up bending but not by much, certainly not enough to stop me using it. I was thinking at one point the change the rear housing to some other custom one. Still though, I did have to replace the locking tabs on the joycons at one point. The original tabs are made of plastic and as such they wear out after clipping and unclipping from the main Switch console unit. Without replacement, the joycons would simply slide free when you're using the Switch in handheld mode. I managed to get metal ones and put those in the joycons, plus spares on standby and locks in place fine.

[VampDude]

I've been lucky with my Joy-cons, as they've remained intact for the slider-click-mechanism throughout my many detachments. But when I have to replace those parts, I'll be changing the housing to the cool Super Nintendo theme (now that my Switch is void of it's warranty).

Spoiler!

Nintendo will possibly ban my console before anything breaks.

Spoiler!

Possibly the only image on the internet that has "LEGAL" backups on the Switch (which also doesn't break any DCEmu rules).