Topic: Theory: The Switch successor will be all-digital.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is 'IC' here?

Again, this is anecdotal, but apparently 8GB is the default (and costs about the same per unit as a 25GB Blu-ray disc for publishers), with publishers saving more money with lower capacity cartridges.

There are plenty of games out there that fall under 1GB, so it makes sense to continue to offer cartridges in that size.

@gcunit
IC = Integrated Circuit. Long description, instead of building a circuit out of individual components like transistors you take a slice is silicon and make some have less electrons and other bits have more. Which allows you to make super tiny transistors in one integrated package

Short story, this is what's inside a Switch cartridge:
https://i.imgur.com/5PFpEgV.jpg
The black thing is the IC

As a side note to this discussion it's worth remembering why game sizes had become large. Prior to the PS5/XBox Series games were built under the assumption that you'd have an optical drive and a mechanical hard drive. The largest games on the PS4/XBOne were as large as they were because they had duplicated assets in order to get around the fact that HDDs have decent sequential but slow random read speeds. The Switch uses solid state storage, random read performance is not an issue

Then on the PS5/XBox Series we're entering into a new age. All of a sudden storage is SUPER fast which means your bottleneck is no longer the storage but the compression you put on it. So assets are not compressed, you read directly from the disk into VRAM. Which adds up considerably especially when your assets are designed for running at 4K natively. Just quietly, I think it's unlikely Nintendo's next hardware will have a 1TB Gen 4 NVMe SSD and I doubt its largest games will run at 4K

I think the most likely scenario? When the next generation starts 32GB is on the new hardware what 8GB is for the Switch. 64GB will be relatively common but higher capacities will be an option. However, with the spec they're targeting I doubt there will be many games that require more than 64GB. The ones that will will be the same sorts of games that push that limit on the Switch, mostly compilations

The only way this would make any sense is if the Game Card port of the Switch (and a design for its successor) costs enough to be worth removing. And I'm going to imagine it doesn't. Optical drives are a different beast that save Sony and Microsoft some money when they are not included in their consoles. Not to mention they free up a little space in the dimensions of the console.
You also have to consider consumer preferences. Nintendo is the most relevant console maker in Japan right now, and Japanese consumers tend to like physical media more than the USA or other markets.
Japan and some European markets are also much more cash-heavy societies than the USA. What makes more sense: buying a physical game with cash or buying eShop cards with cash to buy games that are available physically? The answer is pretty obvious.

This

I would only go for such a console if the games were available through a Steam-like Nintendo store, where the games will all be playable on future Nintendo systems and when you buy a new Nintendo system, you can download all the games you purchased for the previous system.

Nintendo haven't mentioned anything about this in any context. If they were thinking about such a move, I reckon they would have had some dev share their thoughts on the matter so as to gauge reception. (Y'know, like how they talked about a family of systems etc.)

Just posting to say that last year me made some solid points on this necro thread. Not sure we need to discuss this much any further, I think I've sufficiently beaten this theory into submission already