A short time ago, we reported that some Wii U owners were finding their systems had died after being in storage for a while, with NAND corruption being exposed as the issue.
As is so often the case, a member of the modding community stepped up to help. Electronics engineer Voultar created the Wii-U NAND Rebuilder (AKA The 'NAND-AID') which is capable of resurrecting your dead Wii U and swapping out the defective NAND with a Micro-SD card.
Fast-forward to the present and another modder by the name of Mathieulh is claiming that Nintendo was aware it was shipping Wii U consoles with faulty parts from the very beginning.
"It turns out Nintendo knowingly put bad hynix emmc parts into many WiiU consoles and wouldn't extend the warranty as they failed, worse, they did not provide any tools to unbrick those units it was down to hackers to find the way to avoid those WiiU from filling up landfills," he says on social media without providing any evidence for the claim. "That talks volumes about how much Nintendo cares about the environment and their customers."
Voultar was quick to refute this claim:
While I appreciate that this person used my Wii NAND-AID to fix his Wii-U, I strongly disagree with his assertion that Nintendo knowingly used a faulty memory module during the production of the Wii-U. There is no evidence to suggest this and is completely unsubstantiated.
Mathieulh has responded to Voultar's tweet, saying:
Unless the manufacturer lied to them and Nintendo performed no amount of quality checks on those parts whatsoever, they had to know, the bare minimum when testing emmc is benchmarking for wear leveling by performing multiple years worth of use through constant writes. The industry standard is 10 to 20 years depending on the part. There is no way Nintendo ordered millions of these parts and shipped them to factories without prior testings from either themselves or their suppliers, that's just best practices.
As many people have pointed out in the replies, it wouldn't be the first case of a major manufacturer supplying dodgy goods. Early PS1 consoles suffered from skipping CD drives, while the Xbox 360 "Red Ring of Death" needs no introduction.
However, these are issues which are usually discovered years into the lifespan of a console, and while it's tempting to leap to conclusions, it's unlikely they were premeditated.
We'd be stunned if Nintendo would knowingly risk using defective parts in one of its consoles, but perhaps you think otherwise? Let us know with a comment.