Bingo. All the companies involved in making SoCs will be looking to cut out the ARM licensing fee. ARM typically takes $1-10 million up front plus 1-2% per chip, so you can see how their customers would be eager to keep that for themselves.

I feel like Microsoft and Nintendo are engaging in a contest to see who can come up with the silliest and least informative names for their consoles, and I look forward to the upcoming "XBox One-not-1 X 360" and "Newer New 2DS U".

I voluntarily upgraded from 7. And I regret it.

I... don't own an XBox. I'm not sure where you got that idea.

First, it's one guy with a soapbox to stand on. Of the other 2 million consoles, we don't know how many others have failed.
Second, the Switch has only been out for a single week and already we're seeing reports like this. Now we get to play the game of "will the failure rates follow a bathtub curve, stay constant with time, or increase with time?"

Finally, I was genuinely excited about the Switch at first. But then I heard the reports about low FPS when connected to a TV, and the joy-con connectivity issue, and the dead/stuck pixel issue, and a half-dozen tiny nitpicks (flimsy kickstand, etc); and I decided to wait and see, hoping that process improvements and software updates would fix things.
But now it's becoming pretty clear that Nintendo really cheaped out on their components. At this point there's nothing that would convince me to get a Switch other than Nintendo allowing save game backups or implementing their own cloud backups, and also releasing a newer model Switch with more durable parts.

Having been on the fence about whether or not to get a Switch, this is the news that settles my decision on "hell no". The inability to back up saved games would have been somewhat tolerable if the storage medium were reliable, but clearly it is not. There's no way I'm going to risk having all my progress thrown to the four winds.

Here's what I really don't understand: saved games are small, and Nintendo presumably has capable servers because it offers downloadable games. Steam has shown us that it's perfectly reasonable to ask that the service you download your games from also back up your saves, because it's a huge benefit to the gamers at a miniscule cost to the company. Does Nintendo really not give a damn about their customers?

Also LTE latency.

While others have already pointed you to the fourth amendment of the Constitution, I'd like to add the third:

But wait, you ask, what does that have to do with anything? Well, according to the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, this amendment upholds the individual's right to privacy by forbidding the government from forcing you to accept the prying eyes of its agents into your private home without due process.

What about the illegal drugs and child pornography that the previous occupant left hidden in the wall, next to the water pipes? You know, the ones you now have to prove aren't yours?

Clicked on this solely to find out how far I'd need to scroll before the first Grim Fandango reference.

It doesn't take a fortune teller to see how this will end. Anyone with experience with low-cost offshore replacements knows that after the painful transition and a slow degradation of IT performance (with all the slowness, bugs, and embarrassing security breaches that come with it), the fallout of the university's decision will ultimately cost a hell of a lot more to fix than what is saved up front.

I don't think that's going to be a problem. From what I've read, humans treat sounds as simultaneous if they occur within 0-20ms of each other (depending on loudness, this can go up to as much as 100ms). Literature on audio-video simultaneity is much more complicated so it's harder to give solid numbers, especially since people's brains apparently quickly adapt to ignore the effect of slightly out-of-sync videos, but I'd say your average person would find it hard to notice any audio-video lag shorter than 80ms. In any case, a few dozen microseconds either way certainly won't be noticed by the user.

Instead, I'd say the problem that will plague most airpod users will be audio dropping out altogether from wireless congestion in crowded areas.

So, would this be Apple tacitly acknowledging that these things are guaranteed to quickly fall out and get lost?

Ah, yes, good point. One nested function call too many could exhaust available memory just as easily as malloc.

MISRA disallows using malloc in a car's critical systems code. I imagine a Mars lander would be subject to at least that level of stringent requirements.