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Desperate Nintendo Switch Owners Are Learning to Repair Their Own Busted Systems

Demand for replacement Switch parts has tripled during lockdown

Maddie Stone
OneZero
6 min readMay 20, 2020

Photo: iFixit

Jorge Urquidi enjoyed two carefree years with his Nintendo Switch before experiencing the bane of all Switch players: In April, the joystick on his left Joy-Con controller started to drift, causing his Animal Crossing character to move toward the bottom right corner of the screen even when he wasn’t touching the controller.

“It just felt like all of a sudden, it was not working properly,” Urquidi, a water resources engineer based in Austin, Texas, told OneZero.

The owner of a pair of special edition Joy-Cons from Super Mario Odyssey, Urquidi didn’t want to send his faulty controller to Nintendo for repair even though the company will reportedly fix the problem for free because he was afraid Nintendo would send him back a generic replacement. So, he went on the DIY repair site iFixit, ordered a $20 repair kit, and replaced the faulty left joystick at home using iFixit’s step-by-step instruction guide. The repair took 20 minutes.

Urquidi’s decision not to send the controller to Nintendo turned out to be prescient. Although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, the company had announced in late March that all of its North American…

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OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Maddie Stone
Maddie Stone

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Even in a technology climate where more and more companies are encouraging new replacements over repairs, it's fascinating to see stories like these pop up. I think we're heading towards more people becoming DIY electronics technicians, especially…

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I decided to purchase new joycons from Best Buy because of the drift. I had the new joycons for about one week before the room started spinning in Animal Crossing NH. Literally if you entered a room in a house it spun around in a circle. Tonight…