Gadgetory

there's been a lot of rumors circulating recently about the possibility of a hardware revision coming soon for the switch and I'm not talking about a switch XL or a switch slim something we normally see midway through the development cycle but an actual performance boost that for now let's call the switch Pro recently we got the 5.0 update for the switch which along with all the other little add-ons and changes it made like her a more profile images something that data miners discovered is that along with all that information was support for a new PCB and a new chipset for the switch now in the chipsets case this is natural people are thinking there's an argument for a more powerful switch it looks as though the chipset talked about which is the t21 floor from Nvidia it's just an offshoot of the current Tegra chip that's in the switch it's not more powerful instead it's just well more secure the idea being that it would be part of a quiet Hardware refresh for the switch that'll make it harder to homebrew or mod so relevant to those of you that want to do hacking on your switch but not for most other people where we're getting the rumors of increased performance is the new PCB that's supposedly supported by the 5.0 software which was supports up to 8 gigabytes of RAM instead of the current four gigs that are in switches in all likelihood this increase in RAM support is not actually a sign of a new switch coming out sometime this year but rather it's just opening up more power for dev kits so that if there is some kind of pro model coming out in the future down the line this is gonna let people to start preparing for that right now but what would it look like if we were to get a switch Pro sometime soon the switch as we have it right now is a perfectly solid and fun system I mean evidenced by the fact that it is been selling really really well obviously no one hates it but even when it first released there's a lot of comments people had right away about the design of it that could have been done better and I'm not just talking about the performance of a I mean yes we can always ask for more performance more power better graphics more RAM whatever but there's a lot of stuff but the physical design system that could have been done better we could have a stronger physical design so that it's not warping when it's sitting on the dock for too long we could have kickstands that actually properly support the system when it's in tabletop mode maybe having two of them so it's actually stable and not gonna fall off after you used it more than four times and if we want to learn more about performance there's other stuff we could do than just the graphical power of the system a big thing that I think the system could really benefit from is battery life I love using the switch as a dedicated handheld and really sucks when I'm playing a big-name game on it and I'm only getting two and a half maybe three hours of handheld time to arrive to sit down and plug it into something which gets really annoying I would rather take that over getting better graphics in handheld mode there's also the idea of internal storage yes you can buy a microSD card to store more stuff on the switch but it'd be great if the internal storage on it actually allows you to carry a larger number of games before having to buy any kind of add-on or accessory especially with how many games are now going pure digital and when we talk about the idea of a switch pro or some kind of revised switch something I think we should look at is not just the switch itself but also the dock I mean let's take a look back at some of those old patents we were all speculating on back when the switch was still kind of an enigma and mystery the idea that back then the switch dock wasn't just something that you put the switch into and it would allow it to play games in the TV but the dock was actually an external power source that would give more graphical power to the system the one we have right now is basically just a glorified USB see two HDMI connector the switch isn't getting more power from it it's just not caring about its own performance because battery isn't an issue anymore so if we've got some kind of new revised switch we could have one still has great battery life in portable because it's using the same graphics but then it's still getting even more performance when in TV mode because the dog is actually giving it that extra little oomph it needs now is any of this something that Nintendo might actually do maybe look the likelihood of Nintendo doing something like a switch pro as soon as this year is just not very high I mean yes there have been system refreshes in the past where you always do things like make something a little slimmer or maybe a little more power efficient but doing an actual more powerful system only a year and a half two years later just doesn't make sense especially when the switch is doing so well now does this mean that Nintendo would never do a more powerful version no not at all actually think that's very likely at some time the next few years we will get some kind of more powerful switch because what may not be you know traditional for most companies to do this with a system like this that's a tradition that's been broken a lot with this latest generation I mean we've seen Xbox do this with the one expert supports 4k PlayStation with the ps4 Pro even Nintendo did this with the 3ds we had the three yes in 2011 and three years later in 2014 we get the new 3ds which is more powerful and there are some games that can only work on that version of the system so it's not outlandish to think that Nintendo could carry that same kind of process over to the switch and I think another really interesting idea to consider is whether or not Nintendo is toying with the idea of doing something like we've seen with phones and tablets where yeah we have the switch but every three years there's a hardware revision of it that's more powerful and while they make sure the same library across modes of the system's eventually there's a cut-off point where there is new more powerful and just better-looking games than the newest version will support now honestly I don't think this is some good Nintendo will do but they've clearly toyed to the notion before because that's what they did with the 3ds so it's not impossible