I could probably build an entire second career just making videos about
Nintendo's bad behavior, but the one we're going to look at today is one
that's going to hit the wallet of nearly every Switch 2 owner, the completely
unnecessary left turn into proprietary bill that they have taken with the
Switch 2. While the rest of the game console industry has made serious
strides toward universal standards and interoperability,
this dock is a classic example of
locking down a product not for a good reason, but just because we can or to
make a buck or because I don't know, you. And the bigger problem here is
that Nintendo is a market leader and their actions may very well embolden
other tech companies to do the same. Check this out. This dock here works
perfectly on the Switch One and in fact every other device on the table and the
Switch 2. No, no, no. That's the only
device we were able to find that it won't work with. All of these docs and
dongles you're looking at now will work with the Switch One or with your laptop,
but you can't use them on your Switch 2. It would seem then that Nintendo has
opted to make their new universal serial bus device a little less universal.
Question is, how? I mean, it's still got a regular type-C connector. So, what's
happening? To find out, we have the Infinion Protocol Analyzer, a little
device that intercepts the communication between two USBC PD devices and allows
us to see exactly what Nintendo has done. Oh, here we go. Normal, normal,
normal, vendor defined message. >> Mhm. But what the heck is a vendor
defined message? And what is this message from our sponsor?
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Let's take a step back and explain the wonders of USB in the modern age, which
is going to give us some additional context as to why we should be especially mad at Nintendo. Since its
inception in 1996, USB has been a consistent standard
that's replaced many connectors with one
easy to insert connector. There's been tons of
revisions with increases in power and data delivery as well as more and more
functionality with each update, all while maintaining a pretty robust
backwards and forwards compatibility. It's honestly a pretty impressive
collaboration in an industry of minmaxing profiters. Arguably, its
biggest change came with the introduction of the USB-C standard,
which was partially intended to make all USB devices just a little more
universal. Although there's definitely
been some snags in the decade plus since the update. In an effort to reduce the
amount of USBC devices that may fry each other because of voltage
incompatibilities, the USBC PD or power
delivery standard was released. As many of you will know, that's a protocol for
negotiation between two devices to communicate their power and data
capabilities. Lucas from the Labs just wrote a really fantastic article about
this handshake. And if you want a little more detail, you should definitely give
that a read. For now, let's test what's
actually happening with the Switch 2 to understand what we're working with. Let's test out the Switch 2 and the
Switch 2 doc first. Mhm. Mhm. And we
have image. Wow. These two devices meant to work together work together.
Fantastic. Let's take a look at what all these messages mean. This interface can
be a little bit overwhelming if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. Um the main thing to know is the
message column is the messages that are being sent in between the two docs. In
the power roll we have SNK which is our sync device and SRC which is our source
device. Uh in this case our source is our dock and our sync is the switch. So
the first thing we're seeing is the source uh offering up its capabilities.
So when you look in this pane over here, you can see that it's offering 5, 9, and
15 volt power. Good. CRC, which you'll see all the way down, just means roger.
Then our switch is talking SNK, and it's
looking for object position three, which is the 15 volts of power. We get a
rodger. We get an accept uh from our dock. We get another rod. Next, we have
power supply ready, meaning it's get ready to deliver its power. We got our
rod. Then we have a data roll swap. So now the switch is switching roles. Uh
and it's kind of taking control of the interaction. Then we get our VCON swap.
And to oversimplify, it's just another part of kind of the data roll swap. Uh
we got good, we got good power supply ready. And then we have a little soft
reset where you can see this SOP prime. That's actually when the USB devices are
talking to the intermediary devices. So it might be talking to a cable that's in
between if it's an active cable or uh
part of the dock or something. So right now it's doing a little soft reset for
those. Then we have our vendor defined messages. And you can see in this pane
it's asking for discover identity. And this is the first time that our doc and
our switch are going to communicate, hey you Nintendo, are you Nintendo device?
Vendor defined doesn't mean that it's like an exclusive lockdown thing necessarily. Um but it can. And then in
quick basically we have these vendor defined messages where the doc and the
switch are going to try and negotiate their DisplayPort mode. Uh it takes
clearly a lot of vendor defined messages and this is sort of where the things
become a little unusual. In this case it's going to work and we get a display
on our screen uh after they've negotiated their modes. But let's take a
look at what happens when we connect the Switch 2 to a dock that won't work. Now,
we're going to test out this pretty generic Nucleium USB type-C dongle. You
can immediately see things are a little bit different. Our dongle gives it source capabilities. The switch requests
uh based on that. Uh we get our power supply ready, VCON swap, and then the
data roll swap. And you can see that it's actually in a different order. The VCON and the data roll swap are in a
different order, which ends up in a reject from the switch. They try this a
couple times. Eventually, it works. Power supply. We do our little uh
intermediary soft reset and then we do
it all again. And that's a little bit strange. Why are we doing it all again?
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're getting to our our intermediary reset
and then we're into our vendor defined stuff. We're find we're trying to find
who's talking to who uh in specific. Are these Nintendo products? And then we're
discovering the modes. Uh and this is generally the DisplayPort modes in this
uh the switch is asking for a specific
mode. We get connected, we get UFD connected and then it kind of just like
fizzles out and then it sort of stops communicating. And that's going to be
kind of a reoccurring pattern where things don't happen in the same order,
things get confused and then the communication kind of just ceases. Let
me show you on a monitor. This one's even more clear why things aren't
working. They're trying to do the data roll swap and there's a rejection
happening from the switch. These two
buddies not working together so good. But we're still seeing our pattern that
the switch has a little bit of a difficulty negotiating when things don't
go exactly as it's expecting. That means
only hardware with the exact validated negotiation can decode these messages
and successfully negotiate a display out from the switch too. And this isn't a
technical limitation of USBC itself. Most PD devices can navigate these
operations in different orders and make it work. Rather, I think the most likely
answer here, and the one that avoids making claims we can't absolutely
confirm, is that Nintendo made sure that it worked on their own devices and then
stopped their efforts there. That means that even if a third party doc has the
correct power delivery and video output capabilities, it just won't fully
function with the Switch 2 unless it can successfully communicate using Nintendo
specific undisclosed protocols. This communications lockdown definitely could
be malicious, but I wouldn't feel confident taking Nintendo to court about
it, but I'm not sure I would chalk it up to pure carelessness either. The most
likely scenario in our opinion is that
this is an example of tactical laziness.
What a beautiful term. Because the
benefit of this inification is so obvious, money. You need a second dock
in your house. Well, instead of using something you already have, that'll be
$120 more directly to Nintendo. Thank you very much. You want to go traveling
and have something more portable. Time to order another expensive Nintendo
approved accessory. It makes me wonder if we would be better if they just use
proprietary port. On the one hand, it would solve the seeming underhandedness
of the issue and the ensuing consumer confusion. Everyone would have known
from the get-go about the incompatibility, and maybe Nintendo
could have justified it with a neat unique feature like a walking port, all
while leaving the top USB port uh as is
for charging. But that would mean needing to develop and manufacture a
proprietary port, possibly upping the price over a mass-produced generic part
with Nintendo fronting the R&D cost. And
proprietary ports means that it's Nintendo's own IP, so they can set the
license fee. probably upping the cost on third party accessories. It would also
mean increased e-waste longterm when there's more Switch 2 docs left than
Switch to players. That's really not ideal. On the other hand, it's
exceptionally frustrating to be able to correctly plug in your accessories and
then not have them work. To be fair, that's not a Nintendo exclusive problem.
All type-C ports and cables have not been created equal. It's an ongoing
issue. But in my personal experience, the compatibility issues are generally
trending towards becoming solved, not launching themselves towards totally
unnecessary compatibility catastrophe, which just makes this so infuriating,
especially since the Switch 2 is less capable than most modern regular TypeC
devices. The charging caps out at around 15 watts, which may be good for battery
health long term, but it certainly would be nice to have the option to fast
charge when necessary. and variable refresh rate is currently not possible
via the dock. You can only do that in handheld mode. So, we're really not
asking much of these. Even Apple manages to be more universal than this crap.
Apple was one of the pioneers of the industry move towards mass adoption of
USB type-C and Thunderbolt. I remember they actually took a lot of flak for
being the first to ship a laptop, the 2015 MacBook, with only USB type-C,
which is especially funny when you consider how they had to be dragged kicking and screaming on the phone side.
But I digress. The point is, in spite of Apple's long proud history of making
things proprietary for no obvious user benefit, even they haven't gone as far
as creating a proprietary handshake between their cables, their accessories,
and their computers. Although, don't imagine for a second they're not capable
of it. Oh god, I hope they're not getting any ideas from this cuz once
Apple does something, well, the industry follows. Hopefully Nintendo doesn't have
quite the same influence. While we've harped pretty hard on Nintendo so far,
we want to give credit where credit is due. >> Do we? They're helping to push the micro
SD Express standard into the mainstream instead of making some expensive
proprietary format like the Xbox Series or the PlayStation VA.
>> Okay, that's fair. But not even everything they've done with their
non-proprietary storage is good. The fact that they don't let you just dump
save game files off of your system onto it is quite frankly offensive to me.
Nintendo has angered all of us with their game prices. But here's the thing,
the most that that can cost me is about $80. That's the worst case scenario. But
imagine this. I dump 300 hours into a
game and then I don't subscribe to Nintendo Online, so I can't back up my
save. and then I happen to lose my Switch, a portable device, I lose 300
hours. I mean, okay, obviously I'm not being paid to game, so it's not a
straightforward mathematical equation. But if we're talking about what it would
cost me in my time and my personal energy to go back and get all of that
back, honestly, I'd rather go to work for one day so I can buy a newing game
versus dump another 300 hours in to get back what I lost.
>> So, what can we do? Well, the best thing to do is not give Nintendo your money.
either wait for the next gen Yuzu or just skip Nintendo games until they fix
this. That's probably the best, most impactful move you can make. But when
you look at the Switch one and two sales number, it's pretty easy to feel like
your wallet's vote doesn't get you very far anymore. And I don't feel any kind
of moral superiority for telling you to stop engaging with Nintendo's games.
They are clearly making fantastic experiences that no one else can match.
and I and lots of you want to play them.
You could buy third-p partyy options like the Antank S3 that we're going to
have linked down in the video description that somehow has the ability
to speak the Switch 2's proverbial language.
Who the knows how Antank figured that out? A friend at Nintendo or on the
third shift at one of the factories? Random dumb luck. Regardless, it works
for now. Nintendo could technically alter that deal on a whim by changing
their protocols in a neat little game of cyber cat and mouse. But what we'd all
really like is for this video to be out of date as soon as it hits the internet.
It seems like Nintendo has it within their power to push a couple of firmware
updates to stop this baloney. Baloney like this Segway sandwich to our sponsor
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description box. If you like videos showcasing the baloney big tech is
trying to pull over on you, you should watch our most recent tech gripes. So
many damn gripes, man. I sit a lot
cooler in this one. Good job, me.