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.
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.