The Nintendo Switch Is the Future of Gadget Design

Here are a few of the places I've played Mario Kart in the last two weeks: On the couch. In bed. On the train. In an Uber. On a plane. In a Vegas hotel. At the dog park. In a weirdly long line at Trader Joe's. And, of course, on the toilet, more times than I'm proud of. In every case, all I had to do was whip out my Nintendo Switch, press a button or two, and head off to the animated races.

Like most people, I'm a bit late getting my hands on the Switch, the console Nintendo released earlier this year. Just try finding one. They're not easy to come by. By the time you see the tweet that Best Buy's got 'em in stock, they're already gone. Nintendo simply can't make them fast enough to meet demand. I've only been playing Mario Kart and Breath of The Wild and Splatoon for a few weeks now, after stealing a review unit from a co-worker, and I'm still in the throes of the happiest gaming experience of my life.

The best thing about the Switch is its amazing shape-shifting ability. Slot the the Joy-con controllers on either side of the 6.2-inch screen and hold it like a big, widescreen GameBoy. Flip out the kickstand on the back of the display, grab a controller in each hand, and play like you have a Wii and an itty bitty TV. Drop the Switch in its holster, wire it to your TV, and game from the couch as your forefathers did. You can play games with one Joy-con in each hand, or with both hands on one; it's a motion controller, button controller, and pseudo-Kinect all at the same time. Play together on one screen or throw a LAN party.

Even the Switch’s software contributes to its infinite sense of possibility. The device turns on in a few seconds, and resuming a paused game takes no time at all; you can play equally happily for five minutes or five hours. The super-simple home screen looks the same whether the display you're staring at is six inches or 60. You can navigate everything with a controller or your finger. There are no wrong answers.

This console, made for shooters and runners and jumpers, can become something much greater than Nintendo ever imagined, because anyone who wants to can build both software and hardware to improve it.

The Switch is the first gaming system that works anywhere and everywhere. But it also makes a strong case for modular gadgets—ones with malleable, changeable, hot-swappable parts that turn one thing into many things.

The tech industry has been hacking away at modular gadgets for a few years without much success. Google's Project Ara modular phone started as a skunkworks project, became a real product, then died. Motorola carried the idea over the finish line with the Moto Z and a bunch of snappable accessories, but I've never seen one in the wild. LG's G5 proved to be both a modular phone and a failed product. More recently, Essential has pinned part of the success of its upcoming phone on a magnetic accessory port that supports a 360-degree camera and more, while Facebook's supposedly working on a modular handset too.