The Nintendo Switch, opened.
Would you call the Nintendo Switch easy to repair, what with its infamously drifting joysticks, glued-in battery, tiny and easy-to-damage ribbon cables, and lack of official repair instructions and replacement parts?
iFixit doesn’t think so anymore. After giving Nintendo’s handheld a rosy welcome at its 2017 debut, the online repair site says the Switch no longer lives up to 2025 standards — and so iFixit is cutting the Switch’s repairability score in half, from 8 out of 10 to 4 out of 10.
We’ve never put too much stock into repairability scores, but iFixit’s reasoning (in this blog post) makes some sense to me, as a person who happens to open every handheld game system I test for The Verge. It’s not Joy-Con drift — it’s that the industry has moved on.
As of 2025, many handheld gaming PCs are far easier to get inside and repair, and devices are beginning to offer batteries that can be replaced without painstakingly prying a fragile and dangerous-to-damage object (the glued battery) away from their frames. Some iPhones now even let you remove battery adhesive with a jolt of electricity.
Plus, the Steam Deck kicked off an expectation that companies that truly want to offer repairable handhelds will make their parts publicly available to purchase, perhaps even through iFixit itself. That’s not a place where Nintendo is playing ball —- although New York right-to-repair law may require Nintendo to provide parts for the Switch 2 in the USA, as iFixit points out in its blog post.
This isn’t the first time iFixit has retroactively decided to diss a big gadget company after thinking better of it: iFixit broke up with Samsung in 2024 after Samsung wasn’t forthcoming with official parts and required customers to buy batteries that were preglued to phone screens, among other restrictions. I wonder if they’ll exert similar pressure on Logitech.
iFixit isn’t dissing Nintendo nearly as hard as Samsung, though.
“The original Switch still has bright spots: its modular design philosophy for the joysticks, replaceable (and expandable) storage, and mostly straightforward internal layout all remain commendable. But when compared to newer devices that also offer standardized M.2 slots, socketed components, and widely available parts and repair documentation, the Switch shows its age,” writes iFixit.
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