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Comment by codebeaker | Hacker News Reader

There had been some speculation on Reddit that it was a run of near-obsolete hardware proposed by one of their partners. Some teardown (I can't find a source now) found out that it was shipping with already EOL'ed components that weren't available for back-order from the fabs.

If anyone has more information than my 3rd hand comment, I'd be super interested. I was very disappointed not to find one for sale for a reasonable price. I would have loved one.

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If true that would be a really creative way of making some nice profits. Typically distributors are anxious to dump excess EOL parts as demand will plummet. According to my friend who was an account manager at Wyle they would sell off their stock to one of the 'old part finders' for 1/2 to 1/4 of the previous suggested price.

If Nintendo proactively found a bunch of EOL parts they could make a nice limited edition product out of, the buy the parts at a steep discount, sell the 'limited edition' at a price premium, and maximize their gross margin. Frankly I've never met a procurement manager with the guts to do something like that but I'm sure they are out there.

It dosent really make sense though, its not like engineering a replacement SOC+board that contains some NES roms plus an emulator is exactly a massive engineering challenge. Why not just continue it with some new chips?

I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't already have a team working on it's successor: an internet connected mini console that only plays virtual console games off their store. You could even have a custom common plug on the front and sell a bunch of generations of controllers for some obscene amount of money and know that their'd be a lot of people who'd get four each of at least NES, SNES, and N64 controllers. $40 a pop and that's $480 right there.

Although it's Nintendo and they're kind of known for not catching some of the easy throws.

I bet they are going to focus on getting the Switch Virtual console up and running and guide people that way.

> its not like engineering a replacement SOC+board that contains some NES roms plus an emulator is exactly a massive engineering challenge

If margins on a custom SOC+board are razor-thin, it would be idiocy from the company's pov to add cost and complexity to a project just to result in a decimation of the product's profitability.

While not an exact example, it matches GameBoy creator Gunpei Yokoi's concept of "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology." The idea is that you find widely understood tech, which is inexpensive due to its widespread use in other areas, and find a way to use it in making games. Everything from using calculator LED displays for the Game & Watch to using an accelerometer in a Wii Remote follows that principle.

Sourcing a bunch of inexpensive parts and throwing together something like the NES Classic Edition to fill the gap in an otherwise Nintendo-less holiday season seems to fit that mantra.

Yokoi made some of the first toys (for personal enjoyment, out of spare parts in a factory) which, when Nintendo's young president Yamauchi saw them, convinced him to really commit to the consumer toy space.

and that's why Nintendo hardware is a letdown -- instead of designing ideal experiences, they take solutions and go hunting for problems.

But are the games a letdown? That's probably the question you need to ask...

Cellphone screens for VR is a more recent example of this.

Yeah, but it seems like Nintendo could just move to a slightly newer SoC (say the Allwinner H3) with the same software stack and keep putting these out at a $2 premium to cover the more expensive SoC.

A similar board to what was in the NES Classic, the OrangePi One, is $9.99 retail, and I'm sure Nintendo could put in under 20hrs of work total to add what they need to the board and stay within a dollar or two of that board's price point.

20 hours of work? Are you kidding me? You are going to need to spin the PCB, re-validate signal integrity, deal with the situation of purchasing over 100k of the part, re-tool your manufacturing setup, make whatever software changes are required and re-validate SW, and probably a whole lot of other things.

These are the same kind of delusional people who think Twitter is a weekend project.

And in LED projectors.

The only question is why aren't there chinese made FullHD LED projectors in the cheaper price range?

Maybe as people still buy the 320x200, 800x400 and HD (1280x800) LED projectors. It would take one chinese manufacturer to change the cycle, if he releases a 1920x1080 FullHD LED projector for $300 or less.

>an accelerometer in a Wii Remote

I don't think this is the best example, accelerometers were not a cheap common part at the time. The Wii predates the iPhone, MEMS accelerometers were not anywhere near as widely deployed as they are now and they cost an order of magnitude or two more.

I can remember hobbyists buying Wii Remotes after launch just to rip out the sensors :)

IMO, perfect example is the B&W LCD on the original DMG Gameboy. A generation behind the competition, but cheap and low-power for the time.

The Wii Remote is more an example of Iwata's Blue Ocean strategy.

The rest of the Wii hardware however..

A Gamecube with an extra chip...

Exactly, nobody said that proven and established hardware couldn't be your own hardware after all

The Wii was one of the projects where another company came to them with an idea (of motion controls), IIRC.

Definitely not as widely deployed as now, but I believe they were widespread in laptops to allow shutoff of harddrives during fall detection.

Maybe they found that producing more on newer chips was too costly and it would make more sense to just sell retro controllers for the Switch and allow emulation in their marketplace to sell older games from NES and SNES, etc.

The component grey market is alive and well. If they got 25-50% of the previous sales price then the guy who bought it should be fired. My business that lasted for 6 years and broke 7 figures in a couple of those years paid between 6 and 10 cents on the dollar from Flextronics, Emerson, foxconn and others. On occasion there would be an eol part in the lot that they would buy back at 5x the original price for ongoing repair work years later.

I'm surprised that even in that case, they wouldn't just iterate on components and then come out with it again once they've managed to debug any fun quirks that come from trying to iterate on the hardware and got fabbing capacity ramped up.

On the other hand, Nintendo's been burned before by apparently-boundless demand for, say, the Wii U, and then incredibly sharp dropoff, so they might just be going heavily conservative on the possible profit/possible cost to update.

If they can iterate, increase the value (more games? SNES? Gameboy? etc) and "fix" the DRM "issue" (Ability to hack it... I know that's gotta be burning them up)...

I mean, the more trivial way to lock it down would be to have a truly read-only OS partition, rather than apparently trying slightly (based on my quick skimming of the ways to manipulate the device).

That would forbid dynamic updates (which would let them play cat-and-mouse with fixing holes, if they were so inclined), but would also avoid most things that would require replacing the OS stack.

e: They also clearly knew they weren't building a fortress, given the note buried in the image of "Many efforts, tears and countless hours have been put into this jewel. So, please keep this place tidied up and don't break everything!"

i'd not heard that. but the way it was marketed always seemed to me to be another small experiment in nintendo's non-stop attempts to artificially limit supply. they seemed to use it to test word of mouth and their viral marketing abilities ready for the switch.

I've heard the 2DS was somewhat similar in being based on unused parts for Wii U controllers. That'd also explain the otherwise bizarre move to stop selling such an unexpectedly popular product.

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