Anyone who lived through the Game Boy era remembers well the hunt for batteries and counting how many hours each game would last. In July 2019, Nintendo brought good news along those lines for anyone who plays Switch away from an outlet: a new version of the standard console model, with much longer battery life.
The figures reported by Nintendo: the original Switch, model code HAC-001, lasted between 2.5 and 6.5 hours of battery, depending on the game. The revised model, code HAC-001(-01), lasted between 4.5 and 9 hours. For a practical example, the company cited The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which lasted about 3 hours on the original unit and about 5 hours on the new version.
On the outside, nothing changed: the new model had the same look as the Switch released in 2017, with detachable Joy-Con and a dock for the TV. That’s why here at SavePoint we call this version the “classic” Switch, to tell it apart from the Switch Lite, announced a week earlier. The difference was inside: the console got the Tegra X1+ chip, built on 16 nanometers, more efficient than the original, and that’s where the energy savings come from. Nintendo scheduled it to reach stores in mid-August 2019 in Japan and North America, and in September in Europe.
What came next
After this revision, the family gained one more tabletop member: the OLED model, on October 8, 2021, with a 7-inch screen and 64 GB of storage. The Switch totaled more than 155 million units by December 2025 and became the second best-selling console in history, behind the PlayStation 2. The successor, Nintendo Switch 2, arrived on June 5, 2025.
Where to buy
Source: Nintendo.
Zé Cartucho
Comments (0)
Be the first to comment.