It’s only “outrageously” priced compared to its predecessor, and only if you don’t think about it too much. Considering under the hood it’s basically a phone or tablet, it’s very fairly priced considering the specs.

The Switch 1 is basically a tablet from 2017 being sold for $300. It never received a price drop despite it using 8 year old technology, it actually received a price increase with the OLED model. An iPad 5th Gen from 2017 sells for $50 on eBay, for comparison purposes. Not like for like as that has a way higher res screen and less RAM, but it’s fairly close.

As it’s a new chip with an expected 10 year lifespan, it’s likely on 3nm process which means it has to fight for manufacturing time with TSMC because they’re the only ones who can fab that sort of chip.

All that, plus the expectation that they will be absorbing some tariff costs for now means it will likely never see a price drop, and honestly doesn’t seem that bad in terms of pricing. It’s the cheapest console on the market with the exception of the very underpowered and useless Series S, and it’s competitively priced in terms of the tech under the hood.

So if it will be the cheapest console of its generation, is already cheaper than its ancient competition, is cheaper than a mid range GPU by itself, and is cheaper or comparably priced with similarly specced devices, then how is it so overpriced?

The only argument I’ve heard yet has been “consoles are sold at a loss because the games are expensive” but that hasn’t been true for the industry since the PS4 era, and it’s literally never been true for Nintendo consoles, they always make a profit right out of the gate. So I honestly don’t get it.

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I guess that would be the case if you bought it, beat it and sold it, but most people in that scenario would already own it and then they would just buy the upgrade pack. This $90 option is only for people who don’t own the game in any form yet.

The idea that any significant contingent of people would not own it in any form, then suddenly want to play it on Switch 2 but would balk at the asking price seems unlikely, certainly not enough to cut the price in half.

If they wanted a cheaper option they could always just buy a used Switch copy and then just buy the upgrade pack. I would prefer cheaper Nintendo games too but the reality is this won’t cost them that many sales.

They really wouldn’t. They would have to triple or quadruple sales to take that sort of a hit. As it stands it’s one of the best selling games of all time already, basically everyone interested in it already owns it.

Financially, they made the right decision. As annoying as it is from the consumer side.

One more tip: this probably applies to Android as well, I’m not sure as I haven’t used it extensively. But iOS has very good, deep, system-wide autofill.

Make sure you have a contact card in your contacts marked as you (“My Card” at the top of your contacts list) and populate it with all the phone numbers, emails, and addresses you can think of. Tag them all properly (work, home, secondary, etc) and even add usernames and whatnot, go all out.

iOS will use those details to autofill signup flows in many apps and services, as well as autocompleting stuff like “my address is” and “my phone number is”. Saves a lot of time.

It also has deep password manager autofill integration. So you can enable your favourite 3rd party password manager as the system autofill and you can call it up even in apps to create new logins or retrieve saved ones.

The best advice I can give is: don’t immediately abandon the stock apps. I see tons of people who get an iPhone, immediately install Chrome and Gmail and all I can think is, what’s the point?

AdGuard or a similar adblocker for Safari will give you the results you got from Firefox. Safari on iOS also supports full desktop extensions if the developer chooses to make them available. So things like 1Password work great on it.

Same with the Mail app, Calendars, etc. Try setting up your accounts and services in the stock apps and see if you like them. Besides that, there isn’t much to tweak, that’s kind of the point.

If you want app recommendations, it depends on what services you use. Some of my favourite apps are:

Weather - CARROT Mastodon - Ivory Lemmy - Bean or Voyager Package Tracking - Parcel RSS - Reeder Password Manager - 1Password Remote Management - Remotix Home Server Management (Sonarr/Radarr/SabNZBd) - LunaSea

Agreed. I’ve been following it and the dev for a while. I will happily pay $40 for lifetime for an app, no question. But Apollo started lower and proved itself, by the time it hit $40 lifetime it had years of proven updates and constant support under its belt before it hit that price point.

I think it’s completely fair for devs, especially independent ones and one-person-shops, to be realistic about what it takes to continue supporting their app in their pricing. Especially lifetime pricing, which is a tricky beast.

But likewise, users, even ones willing to pay that amount, are conscious that $40 for a 1.0 app from a dev that is clearly talented but doesn’t have a proven track record is a lot to swallow.

I would also say that all this would be moot if it weren’t for the “40% off” banner. I feel pressured into paying because as much as I’m hesitant to pay $40, I would never pay $56 and I don’t want to miss out. If it was $40 lifetime for the indefinite future than I would be happier to wait and see. But it might turn out to have the opposite effect, push me away before I’ve even tried it out.

I would suggest rethinking this.

USB 2.0 I would buy, I’m sure they have the telemetry to tell them that like less than 1% of iPhones are ever plugged into a computer or data accessory at this point. USB 3 would be nice but it’s not a dealbreaker for almost anyone.

MFI certification I don’t. They didn’t do it with iPads or MacBooks, why with iPhones? It just doesn’t pass the smell test. Just one product that shares the same connector with all their other products has an MFI program but all the others don’t? Even though when it was Lightning, MFI applied to all of them?

It’s possible they will launch a program, but it will just be one that allows you to put the little “MFI” icon on your box. It won’t be one that will limit charging speeds. I get the uncertainty if this was the first Apple product to switch to USB, but it’s the last major one. Just wouldn’t make sense.

A soldiered SSD is not designed to be interoperable, shocking. Because they don’t want you futzing about inside the machine does not mean they will proprietarily extend or restrict external ports. I’m not making excuses for the first one, I’m saying they aren’t the same thing.

I’m just being realistic and using the information in front of me. Apple has been using USB-C for years, and hasn’t done anything nefarious with it. They will do the same with the iPhone 15. It’ll just be a standard USB port. Feel free to spread FUD if you wish, but it’s obvious for anyone following along that this is what will happen. I will happily eat my words if it turns out not to be true.

That I’m not exactly sure about. All I know is that every Apple device with USB-C I own works with all the USB-C docks I own with full port compatibility and video out, yet 3rd party docks have fried Switches and to get video out you need their dock.

If you search online I’m pretty sure people have gone indepth about what exactly Nintendo did differently.

Personally I don’t see those as the same. NVMe and RCS didn’t exist when Apple started doing PCIE storage and iMessage. It is true that they are reluctant to move to a standard or incorporate it if they already have their own solution in place that works for them.

But they haven’t proprietarily extended or altered a standard in a long time. You may feel differently, which is fair. If I had to bet though, I suspect that we’ll just see a standard USB-C port that works with all their other standards complaint chargers and cables they’ve been making for the last decade.

I don’t know why people think this. USB-C is on every Apple product except iPhone and AirPods, and they were quite an early adopter of it, putting it on the MacBook in 2015. For comparison, the first Samsung phone with USB-C was the Note 7, 1.5 years later.

They’ve done nothing proprietary with it in all that time, and Apple products with USB-C have followed the spec quite closely (unlike offenders such as Nintendo). Outside of unsubstantiated rumours and FUD, there’s no reason to think they’ll do anything different.