Apparently Nintendo Fixes the Switch Joy-Con Issue with a Tiny Square

A piece of foam is all it takes to keep RF interference from walking Link off a cliff.

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One of the most pesky complaints from early review hardware of Nintendo Switch was the left Joy-Con intermittently desyncing. The problem was hard to pin down, as it didn't happen to all reviewers or even with any particular consistency among those who did suffer from it, but it was widespread enough that it seemed legitimate. Now that Nintendo has actually fixed a unit suffering from the desync, we know what that entails, and it all comes down to block of foam barely bigger than a pebble.

CNet sent its faulty Joy-Con in to Nintendo, but only after having cracked it open for a "before" photograph. Comparing that to its "after" photo once Nintendo sent it back shows the solution very clearly: a tiny black piece of conductive foam protecting the antenna from RF interference. 

Image Credit: Cnet

For the sake of being thorough, they even removed the piece of foam themselves, and sure enough, the Joy-Con issue came right back. That strongly suggests this was always a hardware issue, so it's likely that Nintendo will just insert the foam in the controllers from the start in future manufacturing runs.

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