Nintendo’s next console is getting a useful security feature.
Nintendo’s next console is getting a useful security feature.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
Jay Peters is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
The Nintendo Switch 2 will have an option to set a PIN to unlock your console when you turn it on. You can see the new “System Lock” option in a new video in the Nintendo Today app that’s actually about a battery-preservation feature.
The lock setting “locks your system with a PIN to protect it from people who don’t play on it,” according to the description in the menu shown in the video. “You’ll need to enter your PIN when you wake the system from sleep mode.”
The original Switch has a “Screen Lock” option, but all that does is require pressing the same button three times to use the device after waking it up from sleep mode. It seems like this new setting improves upon that by actually letting you decide a specific PIN to enter.
The Switch 2 is set to launch on June 5th, and ahead of the release, Nintendo has been teasing out system features through the Nintendo Today app. In addition to the PIN and battery-preservation settings, the app also showed how the Joy-Con mouse mode will let you use a cursor on the homescreen.
