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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • What makes the switch genius level of engineering is the Switch System Software microkernel architecture. When the switch plays a game, it doesn’t have bloated tasks running in the background to render some ads in some shop app you probably won’t visit while playing, but only plays the game. This approach is totally mandatory to get anything to run on the switch’s ancient hardware, but it is also so beautiful and rare to see today from a technical point of view. Where Xbox and PlayStation are directly derived from a multi-purpose desktop PC, the switch is more closely related with consoles and handhelds of the past.

    Therefore a lot of flashy UI elements pulling information from the Internet or animating with some “expensive” (in a performance sense) effects aren’t really feasible, since these would hog up system resources the switch doesn’t have to spare and isn’t even designed to be able to spare. I hope when Nintendo updates the switch they keep this philosophy alive and this would very probably lead to another clean UI.