Nintendo Switch OLED launches today, but buyers in the US and Europe report delays

The Nintendo Switch OLED was scheduled to go on sale today, but it didn’t. The pre-order period is over, and merchants should be distributing consoles too early adopters, but there are delays being reported.

Indeed, all merchants on Nintendo’s US site are showing “out of stock.” In Europe, the situation does not appear to be much better. Although Amazon France claims to have units in stock, Amazon UK expects them to be available on October 12/13. (depending on which color you want). According to Amazon Germany, shipping takes 1-3 weeks.

The OLED model features a larger 7-inch display (up from 6.2”), but the internals are essentially the same – a Tegra X1 processor, 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, and double the eMMC storage (64 GB). The supply issues have yet to be officially explained, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it’s due to a chip shortage. Although the X1 is an older chip, it is not immune to global supply chain problems.

The Switch Lite appears to be in stock, while the regular Switch is more difficult to come by. It’s worth noting that they got permanent price decreases in the United Kingdom and Europe. The OLED version costs €365/£310, the vanilla version costs €300/£260, and the Lite version costs €220/£200.