Joy-Con Drift Is Still a Problem on the Nintendo Switch Lite

Ever since Nintendo launched the Switch, end users have been reporting problems with Joy-Con drift — defined as the controller continuing to register input in a specific direction without the user actually touching it. The issue became steadily worse over time until Nintendo eventually copped to it earlier this year and stopped charging people with out-of-warranty Joy-Cons for repairs they shouldn’t need. Some customers have seen Joy-Con drift appear within days of buying brand-new controllers.

Redditor Dwokimmortalus offers this explanation for why JoyCon drift occurs in the first place:

The way the joycon works is there are two v-shaped ‘needles’ that rock back and forth on two graphite contact strips. The needle position on the strip gives the x/y axis coords to the controller. However, the contact relationship of the pin to the strip is like dragging nails on a chalkboard, rather than running a ball-point pen over paper. The strip is very thin, and begins to degrade from the center point outward, causing the center point to eventually become unreadable.

Some users have modified their Joy-Con controllers to fix them at home, while others have taken advantage of Nintendo’s trade-in program. But the fact that the Switch Lite suffers from the same problem means fixing the issue on this console is an even bigger headache. There’s no way to detach the controllers from the device, so there’s no way to send them in for repair. Sending the Switch back to Nintendo means losing it for however long it takes the company to do the work.

iFixit’s Switch Lite teardown revealed various changes to the Joy-Con controller, but nothing the company thought would improve the drift issue. They write: “A popular guess at the cause of joystick drift is that the black contact pads under the sliders wear down over time. They appear unchanged here, but it’s possible they might be made of tougher stuff this time. Unfortunately that’s beyond the scope of our testing for now.”

The reports coming in from everywhere else suggest that they are not made from tougher stuff and still suffer exactly the same problem as the previous console family. Honestly, this is the kind of problem that would kill my interest in the Switch Lite. It’s one thing to be stuck dealing with a broken peripheral, but the controllers on the Lite aren’t peripherals; they’re fundamentally integrated into the rest of the unit. Granted, people are primed to be sensitive to the Joy-Con drift issue, but we already know that many Nintendo customers are having this problem.

Nintendo needs to do more about drift than just keep repairing the controllers and mailing them back to people. This isn’t an acceptable or minor flaw.

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