The lower margin for the new variant you mean?

From my experience, it comes from costs generated by:

1. Additional R&D-work and QA for the modification

2. New supply-chain deals for lower-volume components

Current sales-volume of Europe is only a quarter of the global volume, so price-negotiation is based on a much lower total volume-forecast.

Even if not, Battery prices today are ~15% higher than in 2024 (I expect Nintendo signed the supply-deal in late 2024), it'll be hard for Nintendo to cancel their existing supply-contract before fulfilling it (!), move to a different component AND get the same/lower price.

--> Better to sell other regions as-is, fulfill the contract and hope for a better climate in a year.

3. Tooling/Assembly (Ramp-Up costs, different processes, QA,...)

4. Re-certification of HW for relevant bodies in that region (Europe is quite lean on this, CE-certification is simple compared to US FTC/FCC)

I can almost hear the conversation with Nintendo of America CEO about covering 1/3 of the cost to get the same SKU and him simply responding "No, we just raised the prices because of component-cost increase, we wait for the HW-refresh in 2H/2027"

I wouldn't be surprised if they plan to unify the SKU again with a premium "Switch 2 OLED", offsetting the additional costs, preserving the margin and having an additional selling-point...

That's probably because Iceland is not an official Sales-territory of Nintendo, it's handled by Bergsala AB, a swedish distributor which serves the market there.

This makes sense - thanks!

The thing about the TI powerbook was, it didn't have to be plugged in to hot swap the battery. You could do it when running on battery power. (It had a tiny internal battery, that could run it for like 20-30 seconds, so long as the screen was closed).

It did also run when plugged in with the battery removed, which is good 'cause the battery eventually failed. So this way I can still run it.

I have an old ThinkPad as my only laptop. It came to me used, with an aftermarket battery.

That battery was great for a couple of years before it started to get wonky, so I replaced it with a different aftermarket battery.

This process took zero tools. It took less time to swap in a new battery than it did for me to write this comment. Anyone can do it; it is not an arduous procedure.

What was the added environmental cost here? Some "single-use" plastics that lasted for years?

Easily swappable batteries do have significant downsides, you either need to compromise on capacity or form factor.

Of course that doesn’t mean they should be hard to replace with some tools and effort.

To be fair back in those days laptops only lasted on battery power for a few hours at most (also old batteries had a very short lifetime compared to modern ones) so being able to swap it was an actually useful feature.

> Non-replaceable batteries

Most batteries are replaceable. The difference is the level of effort involved.

> The fact that you "do not miss" a better world, does not mean it is not better.

In the abstract, yeah, it's better. But the extra battery cost me a lot of money, and I did not feel it was money well spent.