I already have a thread about
my personal New 3DS woes. In my case, the internal L button unit broke (definitely broken, blowing it, won#t work), and I'm now sitting on a basically unusable (for playing, I also use it for development) unit. I don't want to rant, this is just to sum up the situation.
Now, assume you are one of the lucky ones who has a New 3DS or a New 3DS XL with a FW <= 9.2.0, what if anything breaks? Here are your options:
- Send it to Nintendo for a warranty repair (if you still got that): Forget it - you'll get a refurbished New 3DS / XL back, which is practically guaranteed to have a bad FW version.
- Send it to Nintendo for a non warranty repair: See above. Plus, Nintendos repair fees are pretty high.
- Just get the spare parts from somewhere and do it yourself: Spare parts for New 3DS / XL are not yet available from anywhere. And no, not even China shops. You can't use O3DS spare parts, they are incompatible with the N3DS.
- Get a defective N3DS / XL unit and grab the parts from there: Good luck finding a defective unit. If you look around eBay, there are basically none. Most people still have warranty and just send it to Nintendo (see above) instead of selling. If a defective unit comes up somewhere, the price will be pretty high because of the rarity.
- Just get a new N3DS / XL unit <= 9.2.0: Again, good luck. Good FW New 3DS / XL units run for ~280$ here in germany, and I doubt it is better anywhere else. You could let Nintendo replace your defective one (see above) and sell the replacement, but that won't get you anywhere near $280.
The only cheap option you have is to get a replacement / new one with a bad FW. But, even with Ninjhax 2.0, that's not an option if you are a dev and or want to do more with it than Sky3DS allows.