So I've had the Switch for a week and a half now, bought it the first morning it was out, $299.99 plus tax at the Best Buy on the way to work, and mostly I love the thing. Undocking it mid-Zelda-session to keep playing on the train is exactly the fantasy Nintendo sold and it actually works. But I need to complain about something, because it's been happening enough that I don't think it's just bad luck on my end.
My left Joy-Con keeps disconnecting. Not constantly, not every session, but often enough that I've started flinching a little whenever I'm mid-fight against a Bokoblin camp and Link just... stops. Input freezes for a second, sometimes longer, and then either it reconnects on its own or I have to press the sync button on the console and wait. Twice now it's happened right as I was about to land a killing blow on something and I lost the fight because my character just stood there like he'd checked out mentally.
I figured it was my TV or maybe the router in the living room throwing off the signal, so last night I tried it undocked, handheld mode, sitting on my couch with nothing between me and the console. Still happened. Once. Which is less often than in docked mode but not zero, and zero is what I'd expect from a $300 device that's this new.
Turns out I'm nowhere near alone here. There's a decent stack of posts and forum threads from the last week or so, people describing basically the identical symptom: left Joy-Con specifically (funny how it's almost always the left one and not the right), signal drop when the console is docked and there's stuff between the dock and the couch, sometimes fixed by moving the dock, sometimes not fixed by anything short of a factory reset. A few outlets have reached out to Nintendo about it and gotten answers along the lines of environmental interference, other wireless devices, that kind of thing, which is a real explanation but also the kind of answer that doesn't help me at 11pm when I just want to finish a shrine.
Here's the part that bugs me: the right Joy-Con uses the same antenna placement in theory, mirrored, and yet it's the left one that everyone (myself included) keeps singling out. If it really were just generic 2.4GHz congestion from your microwave or your neighbor's wifi you'd expect it to be roughly even between the two controllers. It isn't, at least not from what I'm seeing reported. Feels more like something specific to that unit's antenna or its position relative to the console when docked. I'm not an RF engineer, I could be totally off, but the asymmetry is what makes me suspicious this is a hardware quirk and not just "too many wireless gadgets in your house."
None of this is a dealbreaker for me, to be clear. I'm still playing Breath of the Wild every night I can, and I'd still tell a friend to buy the console. The game alone is worth the price of admission, hyperbole aside, it's the best thing I've played in years. But it's a rough one to launch a $300 piece of hardware with, especially when the pitch is specifically "carry this everywhere and it just works." A controller that occasionally ghosts you mid-combat is the opposite of that pitch.
If you've got one and it's been rock solid, I'd genuinely like to know, because right now my sample size of exactly one console plus a pile of internet strangers isn't exactly rigorous. For now my workaround is just keeping the dock closer to the couch than Nintendo's setup diagram suggests, and hoping whatever this is gets a firmware fix instead of turning into a "sorry, buy a new controller" situation down the line. Wouldn't be the first time a console maker's first patch cycle quietly fixed something they wouldn't admit was ever broken.