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iFixit [...] Sony isn’t the only company to use off-the-shelf joystick modules, but, like Microsoft, they’ve made it difficult to repair this consumable component. Joysticks have a known life expectancy—it’s listed right in a product sheet from the manufacturer. It’s predictable they would fail, which makes you wonder if it’s a willful cost-saving calculation on the console makers’ part to not offer more reliable, or replaceable, sticks. [...]
Tempting as it may be to blame Alps for the PS5’s drifting issues, they probably aren’t the villain of this story—because, brand name notwithstanding, this joystick module looks extremely familiar. You may already recognize it from the prior-gen PlayStation’s controller, the DualShock 4. Or from the Xbox One controllers. Maybe the Nintendo Switch Pro controller. Or, somewhat confusingly, the $180 Xbox One Elite controller. Underneath that plastic cap, the dirty secret is that they all use the same joystick hardware. [...]
Right on page one of the product sheet is the operating life for the RKJXV’s potentiometers: 2,000,000 cycles.
One of our teardown engineers measured their own Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) controller interactions for back-of-the-envelope joystick life math. Averaging ten different 30-second intervals, they made roughly 100 full potentiometer rotations per minute. If you play a less stick-intensive game than a first-person shooter, rotating 80 times per minute, you’ll hit 2,000,000 rotations in 25,000 minutes, or 417 hours—that’s just 209 days, playing 2 hours per day. At a more kinetic 120 rotations per minute, that’s 139 days at 2 hours per day. So Alps’ own rating for accurate joystick measurements is, in one gamer’s hypothetical experience, 4-7 months—and that’s with a very non-pandemic 2-hour cap on your game time. [...]
Nintendo, for all its extended silence on Joy-Con drift failures, at least chose an easily replaceable joystick secured by Phillips screws and a flexible cable, not 16 solder joints. [...]
Here’s Why PS5 Joysticks Drift (and Why They’ll Only Get Worse) - iFixit
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