Sean Hollister

Almost every single thing in Friday’s executive order is about uplifting the drone industry and cutting through red tape (at the potential expense of safety), not about cracking down on the China-based leading manufacturer of drones. But as I noted last week, Trump doesn’t need to lift a finger. The ban on future DJI products happens automatically unless he steps in.

Our 8BitDo pads definitely needed them (they’re live!), and GuliKit has now announced its KK3 Max needs this one to unlock Amiibo support. (Yes, it’s the rare quality 3rd-party pad with working NFC for Nintendo’s figurines, and it’s in our best controller guide.)

Nintendo made the original Switch’s game cards taste terrible, coating them in a bitter chemical called denatonium benzoate. So we had to know... do Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges taste better? Time for a taste test! And while we’re at it, why not add a button battery coated in the same stuff, a Nintendo DS cartridge, and a 3DS cartridge too? Don’t try this at home, kids.

We aren’t having great luck, and Reddit’s seeing mixed results too. Though Nintendo assured the public that “you can use... any compatible USB-C camera you’d like,” our USB-C toting Logitech Brio 4K, Opal Tadpole and DJI OP3 aren’t working, even while a nine-year-old Logitech C922 with USB-A does when docked.

I got in line shortly after 9pm, and finished shortly after 11. The very last customers in line are about to check out now. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tack on a camera or gamepad to my order: Best Buy had plenty of the former, but its system wouldn’t let them sell any cams until tomorrow... and the latter sold out.

Employees have been nothing but friendly and gracious, but it’s a little odd to see many preorder customers could have gotten home 30-45 minutes ago if they’d gotten in the other line by 9pm. Only preorders are still waiting.

My small-town Best Buy line is now just 300 people long, down from 400 an hour ago, as buyers trickle out with the Switch 2. Employees are dressed up in Charizard and Yoshi costumes.

We’re covering this launch live... and it looks like I’ll be here a while, even though I live in a city with (checks notes) a population of just over 65,000 people!

They are at my local Best Buy, which has a whole wall full of the console behind the Order Pickup desk. (Check out my photos below.) But there’s no line at my local Walmart or Target, and I was surprised to find my local GameStop is gone entirely. Guess that store location closed for good when I wasn’t looking.

The SF Bay Area used to have lots of PC stores. Most got wiped out! But Micro Center has returned to Santa Clara, CA, and it’s a joy to browse. (Yes, the store reportedly sold dozens of GPUs that turned out to be backpacks; the company hasn’t yet answered my questions.)