Halfway through October 2021, my youngest daughter, just 7 years old at the time, came to me with concern in her eyes. The Nintendo Switch wouldn’t turn on, and its last few moments of operation were concerning. Something about a download that had just completed, she said, and a button that said “update.” That was the end of the line for that particular unit, but only the beginning of my troubles with a console that would proceed to try my patience until this very day — an experience that makes me loath to consider buying the Nintendo Switch 2.

The Hall family had been victim to a technical snafu as old as mobile devices themselves: the dreaded low-power firmware update. That’s when a device, like an iPhone or a graphics card or a $250 red-and-black plastic hunk of shit, loses power while it’s upgrading its most important layer of software. Firmware refers to the pieces of code that tell a device that it’s a device and not a 398-gram brick, and as I took the tripartite console from my daughter’s tiny little hands — where it was cradled like a dead bird — I knew that it was a total loss. But that wasn’t the worst........

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