Nintendo may be making a big change to their Switch 2 consoles.
UPDATE: Nintendo Patents Watch has translated the Nikkei article, clarifying that a specific EU regulation requires that consumers should be able to remove and replace these batteries.
The original article follows below.
As shared on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit by Joseki100, Nintendo is launching a Switch 2 with a replaceable battery soon.
This comes from a report from Japanese news media Nikkei, but has yet to be confirmed by Nintendo. Nikkei also claims that this is to comply with EU legislation for right-to-repair.
The EU directive itself does not include a requirement that devices like the Switch 2 have replaceable batteries. But it has clauses regarding the availability of spare parts and information on how to acquire them.
So Nintendo is not obligated to specifically make their Switch 2 consoles with replaceable batteries. They chose this course of action themselves to comply with the EU.
Nikkei also speculates that Nintendo may offer this version of the Switch 2 outside the Europe in the future as well. But we don’t know for now if everyone will prefer this.
As this Mashable article from 2018 argues, smartphones stopped having removable batteries because it led to better designed and engineered smartphones. European Switch 2 owners may confirm these arguments themselves if their consoles turn out to have issues inherent to this design.