Topic: What do you think the next Nintendo console will look like?

@Magician
I think we can be very confident it uses LPDDR5. All of the Ampere based Tegra SOCs use it and of all the things we can guess about "Switch 2" the SoC is the one thing we know

I think the switch 2 will look like the hori split pad compact joycons.

I'm torn between this not just being another Switch and it being Nintendo's most "boring" new console. If it's the latter, I might almost be a little disappointed. Call them gimmicks, but Nintendo has always tried to not be too mainstream and make their consoles feature something people wouldn't expect to change how we play. That's usually been the Nintendo way.

Even so, I can also see them wanting to play it "safe" given how they're aware how challenging the transition will be. I'm worried that just calling it "Switch 2" will confuse people like with Wii U all over again.

It'll be this...

Jk LMAO! I remember those kitchen sink memes from the Wii U era lol!

@Croctopus Why would Switch 2 confuse people the same way Wii U did? People understand sequels when it comes to numbers.

PlayStation has always numbered its main consoles. Movie sequels are mostly numbered. Game sequels are also mostly numbered.

I can't remember the last time Nintendo adhered to a numbering convention.

Nintendo are more about "New" or "Super" or "Junior" or "Lite" or "Micro" or "U".

@FragRed Never underestimate how simple-minded people are. If they couldn’t bother doing a little research to see that Wii U was completely different from Wii, I wouldn’t trust them with a Switch 2. “Ooo, a prettier Switch model! But the kids and I already have several models…”

Might as well just be a model if it isn’t anything truly new. Just call it “Switch Pro” again. It kills me that people have thrown around that name and “Switch 2” when rumors have made them sound like one and the same. “Switch Pro” never went away.

I like most, saw the recent patents filled by Nintendo for a new dual-screen device and brushed it off as something that would never see light of day, since the patent seemed to be pointing to a move away from hybrid consoles and back to dedicated handheld systems. However, the more I think about it I'm starting to believe that this really could be our first look at Switch 2 (or whatever it'll be called) and this new design wouldn't be a move away from hybrid consoles but instead a doubling-down on the hybrid and modular design of the Switch.

@yadav59q lol this is a bot

@KingdomTears Is he? That comment seems like a normal person posted it. If that's a bot holy moly has the technology improved!

@LilyGoMEOW his account was created one minute before his post

My hottake would be a DLSS3.5/RT/RTL with OLED/magnetic Joy-Cons sure it would be pricey but then again if it delivers then I will pay for it....just will cringe buying it though. Nintendo files patent to to protect IP/Ideas that can be further looked upon in future upgrades or hardware. Patents are just that Patents Protection for future ideas.

Nintendo try to make each console unique (hence the kooky naming conventions.) It's in their DNA. It's why they are cherished by the industry. You can see it in forums. Take the recent news of Aonuma's take on Zelda maker. How many people think it makes 'perfect sense'? That's all it takes to 'inspire' someone to do something similar. It's why they are so influential and revered in gaming. Now I want a more powerful Switch 2 as much as the next person, but I'm not convinced that would in Nintendo's DNA. It certainly won't capture the blue ocean's imagination as the original Switch. It's certainly a much easier product to compete against if it's going to be that predictable. So it needs some wow factor. Maybe NVidia will perform miracles somehow, I'm not tech savvy enough to know. But if they can't that wow factor needs to come from someplace else (and only their rnd department would know what that is.)
I dunno, Switch is so popular, it's going to have much of the Sony / Microsoft demographic mind set of moar powah! Maybe they do have this section of the market to themselves. No idea, I'm rambling. I would buy a Switch 2 in a heartbeat, but I don't think we know the full story (and certainly hope it's not just a toy that caters to third parties. It contradicts their business model.)

@LilyGoMEOW @FawfulsFury Yeah sorry, should have elaborated. That post is word-for-word the same as the second paragraph from my original post.

@GrailUK The whole Sony situation makes me nervous about "more power". The FTC trial made it very clear that Sony are able to make these ultra high graphics single player epics not because the games sell enough to break even but rather microtransactions like CoD and Fortnite. Compare that to Nintendo who with much weaker hardware only needed 2 million copies sold of BotW to break even.

@Grumblevolcano
There's a bit of a paradox with more powerful hardware. More powerful hardware allows you to do more things. More stuff? Longer development time. But it's not the better hardware that lengthened the development time, it's the more stuff

If anything better hardware reduces development time. To use a work example, earlier this year I was tasked with making a bit of old code more performant. It's code that can run overnight so that's not usually an issue but on some client environments it took litterally days to run. They were running it on wimpy server hardware and expecting it to handle millions of rows. After a full rewrite and a few months of work I got it run 100-10000x faster

If all of our clients were instead running high end AMD Epics with the fastest storage possible? Making it faster probably wouldn't have been required and I would've instead been given something else to work on

Same thing happens with games. Case and point every single game that was ported to Switch but released months after the original due to the heavy optimisation required

Made this simultaneously while baking cookies lmao

This is what I want it too look like, and what I think it has a chance at looking like

@DiamondCore
I kinda like the idea of having an open-faced dock. It's certainly a simpler design and means you're not putting rubber against the screen itself. But I'm not sure they'll go that route. I suspect the reason the dock is the shape it is comes purely down to the fact that there's a USB Type-C connector there. You're forced to dock and undock straight up and down onto the connector. If they allowed you to pull the device forward people would definitely be breaking that connector. Honestly, I'm half expecting this thing to use the OLED dock, literally. The only real complaint I had with the original dock was that it was restricted to HDMI 1.4 and had no built in Ethernet. The OLED dock fixes both. So just re-use it

With that said, there are some changes to the dock they could make. Adding the ability to add additional storage to the dock is something I've thought about since the start. Of course these days it wouldn't be that useful given they could just put enough storage in the thing itself from the start. But even so, having SOME smarts and SOME additional capacity in the dock could be useful

For example if the dock had a slim firmware that could do some stuff? It could download games and updates for you even when your device wasn't at home on WiFi. Maybe the option to add additional storage to it is used for higher resolution asset packs for use while docked. But I think when you go any further than that the cost/benefit starts to fall of a cliff. I mean the next logical step beyond that would be "reverse Wii U" but in order to get to there you need WiFi, HDMI switching, display adapters etc and what you get out the other side is a device running on batteries driving a 55"+ screen wirelessly...... not ideal....

I'm sure they'll change the dock aesthetically for the "Switch 2" and they probably end up bumping up the HDMI spec again. Maybe throw in some more IO of some kind, who knows. But I think fundamentally the OLED dock is probably good enough as it is

I do like the idea of adding a mic back though, I think if they also added a camera that'd be even better. Not sure how that'd work while docked because you're not going to naturally put the dock in a place that works for a mic/camera. I guess cameras are cheap, they could just throw one for use while docked in the box. And if they did that then... sure, throw the mic for the main unit on the bottom! why not

I kind of hope we end up getting a microphone, camera, a dual screen that can be popped out from the bottom, and an open faced dock.

The dual screen is a pipe-dream, at least when considering current docking methods, along with game development and where it's going at the current. While I'd love to have a second screen for inventory management, devs would have to make sure that you don't need that second screen if you wish to play a game on the TV, thus ruining its reason for being implemented in the first place. If it weren't for that, devs probably still wouldn't utilize it; given that we would be stuck in the same situation that the Wii U was in. A situation where devs don't really want to utilize the bottom screen because that would mean they'd effectively have to make a second version that's exclusive to the console itself. Although, they sort of do that already in the first place with Switch ports.

As for the Camera, I feel like that's easier to bring back. Same like with the microphone. While you probably can't utilize it within docked mode, it opens the window for handheld mode titles to actually get creative with its uses.

@skywake yeah, a camera would be nice

I forgot to add a back to the concept, so I fixed that and added a camera lol