Nintendo Files Patent To Ease 'Troublesome' Switch Dock Wires

Image: Ollie Reynolds / Nintendo Life

When you first set up your Nintendo Switch to connect to your TV, you may have been aware of the dock's limitations when it came to connecting the necessary wires.

Looking at the dock from the back, the 'AC Adapter', 'HDMI Out', and 'LAN' ports all face toward the left. If your TV houses its ports on the right-hand side, this means you need to either loop the wires around to the right in order to connect them, or strategically position your dock to the left of your TV in order to alleviate the issue.

Well, this might well be a thing of the past if a recent patent from Nintendo eventually comes to fruition (it's also equally likely that it won't, by the way). Dated 2nd April, 2024 and posted to the Reddit 'GamingLeaksAndRumours' page, the patent is essentially a rotating I/O (input/output) panel designed to allow you to position the dock's ports on either the left or right-hand side.

As Nintendo itself states, this is to theoretically streamline the connection of cables from the dock to the TV; something it describes as potentially 'troublesome' with the dock's ports currently locked to one side.

The below images show the solution in action, showcasing what Nintendo describes as the 'swivel block' rotating 180 degrees to allow the ports to swap from left to right. Two USB ports are also located on the opposite side, so these would also flip over accordingly. As you're no doubt already aware, the USB ports on the current dock are located on the right-side exterior (again, looking at it from the back).

We should stress that the likelihood of this ever becoming a reality is somewhat slim, at least with the current Switch models. The console is now over seven years old and presumably nearing the end of its lifecycle (having sold over 139 million units), so for Nintendo to produce a solution such as this now seems somewhat needless.

As for the console's eventual successor..? Well, who knows. It does seem like an elegant solution to a very specific problem, but right now, how the 'Switch 2' will actually function is anybody's guess.