the price is artificial. the format currently caters to people with high end cameras, so they can shell out money for overpriced memory
It absolutely is, but it seems unlikely that Nintendo has the capacity to change that. Their use of CFe may be transitory, but the high-end camera market is constant.
I think that would depend on # of units Nintendo want available on launch day. I recall seeing someone here shared good data/numbers on the ramp up of number of units produced leading up to launch day. I'd like to go back and try to find that and review, see if I want to reframe my thinking, but I imagine Nintendo wouldn't want anything less than 4.5 months (the amount of time Switch 1 had), possibly more if they think Switch 2 is going to sell even more on launch day than Switch 1 (but with $399 price point, maybe not.. who knows)
If mass production hasn't began (and I doubt it has, I feel like if it has, Nintendo would have announced to get ahead of leaks), then the window for Q1 is rapidly closing, if not closed completely by now. April, May, and June (Q2) is still in play, IMHO.
Very good point, btw do you know maybe what will be potential cost of 16GB RAM( two 8GB 64bit modules)?
I’m also curious about battery but I’m expect 5XXX mAh(Switch 1 battery was 4310 mAh)
COOL, people are asking to see all of my Greatest Hits in this thread!
To the production question, the pre-launch manufacturing for launch quantities effectively scales commensurate to what their annual sales target is, the production lead time does not fluctuate much, typically 3-6 months. So a similar window to Switch is expected, and the launch is likely to suffer less due to a higher sales expectation.
@darthdiablo Here’s the post you were probably referring to:
So to the production question, we know they had to do an emergency increase in production for Switch after its first month to meet demand (even doing air freight shipping for the first few months to get them across the ocean faster), and they sold 2.74 million units in March 2017. Based on that, we can estimate how many consoles were produced for launch at ~3 million and use that to estimate how many were produced per month depending on when production began.
3 months - 1 mil (~33K per day)
4 months - 750K (25K per day)
5 months - 600K (20K per day)
6 months - 500K (~17K per day)
7 months - 428.5K (~14K per day)
8 months - 375K (12.5K per day)
9 months - 333.3K (11.11K per day)
We know Nintendo only expected to sell 2 million in its first month, so demand outstripped their production capacity and reduced excess inventory meant to stopgap between ocean freight deliveries and such. We also need to account for the fact that it is cheaper to open new production and assembly lines than to reduce them (because you’re paying to keep lines open and available while production declines, as we saw with Wii U), so whatever the monthly production rate is would need to be the bare minimum they anticipate selling per month on average across a year, give or take.
So based on that, let’s say they want to double their initial Switch production volume and go for 6 million shipped for the first month of launch and 20-24 million units in the first year of availability (in which time Switch sold over 17 million units, for reference). To produce 14-18 million units across the remaining 11 months post-launch, you’d need a 1.27-1.64 million production volume per month, or around 42-55K per day.
That means, to meet 6 million shipped for launch, they would only need a little over 3-4 months to produce that volume. So if assembly begins in November, a March launch is entirely doable.
We know that T239 was full production ready no later than July, so even if we account for part production needing to start ahead of the assembly line, a 9-month lead time would mean one of the slowest production ramp-ups I’ve ever heard of, or a stockpile of close to 16-18 million units.
You can use similar math adjusted for what you think Nintendo anticipates year 1 sales of the new hardware to be to get the expected launch month inventory volume and the monthly quantity produced thereafter.
As for battery,
@Gerald I’ll quote myself again:
IFixit believes that the active cooling in Switch was over-abundant (especially in the Mariko model), which is why it saw a smaller heat pipe and blower in the OLED model. Additionally, battery density roughly improves at least
5% over the prior year. And this is compounded interest, so a battery of the same size and similar price as Switch’s 4310mAh battery would be able to achieve something close to 5775mAh 6 years later. I’d think a 1465mAh (or 33%) improvement without any change in size and little change in cost is a pretty good change in density.
Since making this post, a ~6064mAh battery is now possible just due to the time since I made this post, in the same form factor and similar price.
This give Nintendo some options, if we assume that new hardware will achieve a highly similar power consumption envelope to Switch at launch in 2017:
- Re-use with the current Switch battery to achieve the same battery capacity as Switch at launch in 2017 and benefit from mature part pricing
- Use a new battery in the same form factor to improve battery life for minimal extra expense
- Split the difference and use a newer slightly smaller battery with a higher mAh, achieving better battery life than 2017 Switches but not improve battery life beyond what has been achieved with the Mariko revision
On that last point, a smaller but more power-dense battery is only likely if the benefit to weight reduction and extra chassis space is something that matters to the overall design, or if the cost savings allows them to spend that savings on something necessary elsewhere.
As for Joycon and Pro Controller batteries, the likelihood is they will continue to use the same parts and benefit from the high rate of part maturity to keep costs lower and just obtain better battery life from using Bluetooth 5. The only way I see that not happening is if they are forced to sunset the CTR-003 battery (that they re-used from the 3DS) in the Pro Controller, but if they haven’t yet, they may not have to.
Lastly, I had a post that detailed RAM pricing trends, but I can’t find it (if I do, I’ll be sure to post it), so I’ll just summarize what I found: LPDDR4 was sufficiently mature by the time Switch was engineered, and the same is true of LPDDR5 now. If they opt for LPDDR5X, they’re likely to pay a little more, but the cost on 12GB of LPDDR5 shouldn’t be expected to be significantly more than 4GB of LPDDR4 was in 2016/2017, especially with RAM over-supply being what it currently is.
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