It's hard not to feel a little disappointed by Nintendo's announcement Thursday of the Switch 2. The fact that the company seems to be playing it safe with its most conservative new console in years isn't a huge surprise. What's surprising is how lackluster the reveal itself was. But maybe that's because, to any tech obsessive, the video Nintendo released looked eerily familiar. The brief three-minute trailer was unlike other gaming console reveals; Instead, it looked almost exactly like the sizzlers that Apple trots out for each year's new iPhone.
Nintendo adopting Apple's strategy makes natural sense. While most of the tech industry's giants have pivoted toward software and subscriptions as their primary business model, with a lack of emphasis on hardware that borders on complacency, Apple is the last major company that remains firmly committed to a hardware-first approach. What you want to sell you are not services, they are laptops, tablets and, most importantly, phones.
A quick look at the gaming industry will tell you that Nintendo is in a pretty similar position. While Sony is releasing as many first-party games as it can on PC, and Microsoft is telling everyone that anything they own can be an Xbox with Game Pass, Nintendo is still committed to exclusive games and console sales. So, apparently, the Apple of console makers is getting an Apple-style commercial.
The Switch 2 trailer has all the bells and whistles: it's gorgeously photographed, with slick transitions showing all the little changes between the original Switch and the new machine, as well as elegantly enlarging the device and toning down the bezel around the screen. The console's new magnetic Joy-Cons even appear to have a bit of Apple's MagSafe DNA at first glance. But while all this works perfectly for a phone that receives a new version every year, it ignores the fact that the Switch 2 can't simply be an update to the iPhone. What the video implies is something strictly iterative, like a phone model. Nintendo's video literally takes the old device and transforms it into a new one. It's no surprise, then, that some viewers felt like they weren't exactly seeing Nintendo's next-gen reveal.
For all the ways Apple invests in getting people to buy new iPhones, it has the luxury of taking those purchases for granted. You know that not everyone will upgrade their phone every year, but that eventually almost every iPhone user in the world will get a newer phone; It is the model on which the entire business is based.
In a world where updates are inevitable, iteration is enough. But I still want Nintendo to sell me something. It's been eight years since the Switch came out, and while some of its open-world offerings have hit the ground running, the absolute need for an update isn't exactly evident.
A video that's sleek, vague, pretty, catchy, and a little hollow is perfect for the hour-long technical discussion from Apple executives that usually comes after the iPhone reveal. But Nintendo's version won't arrive until the Nintendo Direct on April 2, where we'll have to wait for the company to reveal why it really thinks we'll want to buy this new console, aside from the reveal of a bland appearance. Mario Kart which could be just another iteration of mario kart 8 as far as we know.
Image: Nintendo
Like Apple, Nintendo historically hasn't been a stupid company. In fact, it is usually a very successful and intelligent company. Nintendo's top brass presumably know that the company needs innovation and ingenuity more than one iteration, and more than another Mario Kart, to successfully follow the third best-selling console of all time. And the evidence of that innovation is buried in this Switch 2 trailer. There's compelling evidence that the Joy-Cons can transform into a mouse, and there's little potential for 24-player multiplayer and voice chat, which would suggest a vastly improved online experience. On top of all that, there's still plenty of time for Nintendo's publishing arm, as well as other game developers, to reveal games that players can purchase on launch day of the new console.
The problem is that Nintendo's trailer left us to figure all that out for ourselves instead of giving us something concrete to get excited about. And while Nintendo was right to think that fans and websites like Polygon would redact all the details from the trailer, it's hard not to feel like the company took our anticipation a little for granted. It's possible, even likely, that all this frustration will magically subside when we see Metroid Prime 4: Beyondor some magical new Mario game, or even Pokémon Legends: ZA running at a playable frame rate during Nintendo's April 2 Direct. But until then, Nintendo has left us to come up with our own reasons why the Switch 2 is more than a marginal upgrade.
Maybe my old phone is fine for now.