Comment on GameStop’s definition of “New”
Defaced@lemmy.world 11 months agoI went in to a GameStop to buy a new switch charger because my kids lost it on vacation. They told me you have to buy the right kind of charger, I was very confused because I thought Nintendo only sells one kind of charger for the switch. I told the guy I’m using it with a docking station and he pulled out some shitty GameStop branded charger and I said no thanks. The guy proceeded to tell me I would have to buy the charger directly from Nintendo…I went down the road to target and bought one off the shelf after like 5 minutes of looking. Fucking shameless GameStop…
Just to make sure I wasn’t going insane, I looked at Nintendo’s website, and sure enough they only sell one kind of charger for the Nintendo switch. There’s some weird smaller charger they sell for accessories like the pokeball thing for let’s go Pikachu but they very clearly spell that out when you purchase the charger.
greybeard@lemmy.one 11 months ago
Not related to your point at all, but: The switch uses USB-C. Pretty much any USB-C charger will work. For the dock you do want to make sure it can push enough power, but it’s a rather low requirement. I use the same charger for my SteamDeck dock and the Switch dock. It’s the great thing about USB-C. But of course gamestop would try to sell you their generic crap instead of an official one.
Defaced@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You don’t want to be using any random USB-C charger for your switch. The Nintendo switch doesn’t adhere to USB-C power delivery standards and using a different charger can cause problems. That’s why all of those third party docks were burning up switches when the switch first came out.
The docks were standard USB-C docks, but since the switch doesn’t follow proper USB-C standards because Nintendo, the docks were providing too much current and burning up switches. I will never use a third party charger for my switches, although if I did use one, the steam deck charger would be my first choice.
I’m sure the chance of anything happening is so low that it’s probably insignificant, but I’d rather not take the chance, down votes be damned.
greybeard@lemmy.one 11 months ago
Can’t say I’ve done extensive research, and Nintendo would be the first company I would assume would ignore standards, but my understanding is that any half decent charger has a sort of power negotiation to prevent such issue. I suppose if you have some cheap dollar store USB-C chargers laying around it might be risky if they too ignore the standards.
That said, I did have a USB-C PD 65w charger fry a laptop. It was, for sure, the charger screwing up though, I even had warning signs I completely ignored. I miss that laptop, it was a good laptop.