Note: Hall effect sticks aren’t that much more expensive than potentiometer sticks (difference is less than a dollar at scale). However, they require more space than potentiometer sticks and if you’re doing something custom (which Nintendo always does) it can be a great big expense to change your manufacturing processes to insert tiny magnets into injection molded parts.
I suspect the latter is the reason why they abandoned using hall effect or TMR sticks for the Switch 2.
My wild speculation: Nintendo probably gave their engineers some design constraints that limited their ability to use off-the-shelf HE parts (everything I’ve seen really is too big). Rather than change the constraints slightly in order to make the product usable with such parts they stayed stubborn in the hopes that their engineers would come up with an innovative solution. This sort of thing can work to force innovation at really big companies—if they’re not super top-down in terms of decision making.
I’m sure that the Nintendo engineers came up with their own perfectly-workable HE/TMR stick designs but had them shot down in meetings where they discussed the manufacturing costs.
Note: Hall effect sticks aren’t that much more expensive than potentiometer sticks (difference is less than a dollar at scale). However, they require more space than potentiometer sticks and if you’re doing something custom (which Nintendo always does) it can be a great big expense to change your manufacturing processes to insert tiny magnets into injection molded parts.
I suspect the latter is the reason why they abandoned using hall effect or TMR sticks for the Switch 2.
My wild speculation: Nintendo probably gave their engineers some design constraints that limited their ability to use off-the-shelf HE parts (everything I’ve seen really is too big). Rather than change the constraints slightly in order to make the product usable with such parts they stayed stubborn in the hopes that their engineers would come up with an innovative solution. This sort of thing can work to force innovation at really big companies—if they’re not super top-down in terms of decision making.
I’m sure that the Nintendo engineers came up with their own perfectly-workable HE/TMR stick designs but had them shot down in meetings where they discussed the manufacturing costs.