When the Nintendo Switch Lite was announced in July, many seemed to react pretty positively to it. After all, it was a smaller, lighter, and more portable version of the Switch designed for gamers who wanted to game on the move. However, what if you decided that maybe you wanted to play it on your TV?
If you were hoping that maybe you could buy some kind of adapter or accessory that would allow the Switch Lite to output video to a TV, you might be disappointed to learn that will simply not be possible. This is according to a teardown of the Switch Lite’s hardware by YouTuber Jonathan Downey, where he concluded based on his findings that the console seems to lack hardware that would allow it to interpret and output any type of video.
According to Downey, “It appears that the hardware that is needed does not exist on the board, which is a semiconductor that’s required to interpret video. There’s nothing there to interpret and put out any type of video. So, unfortunately, for anyone who’s wondering if that would ever be possible if it gets hacked or something down the road, it does not appear to be the case from what I’m seeing.”
This shouldn’t really come as a surprise as the Switch Lite is meant to be a purely portable console. Gamers who want a hybrid will need to get the slightly more expensive Switch, which is also portable, by the way.