This is great analysis of the hardware (though I'd be interested to know whether the Mariko board in the V2 was wired like the V1 or like the OLED?), but I think the bigger picture is missing a few things. The 11 developers bit was reported in 2021 after the OLED was announced, where Mochizuki doubled down on the existence of a 4K Switch which all these developers were working on and expecting to release games for (which presumably means exclusive or enhanced games) "in or after the second half of 2022." While we all mostly agree that there most have been some conflation of something to explain the incorrect reporting, this part in particular opposes the idea of 4K OLED plans. And even if things got mixed up, you'd think that somebody at that point would have been able to straighten it out after the fact, with so many apparent sources. It also doesn't make sense that the story of developer tools for new hardware would have become about 4K support in the first place, since developers don't reverse engineer firmware and only know what Nintendo tells them in SDK documentation. If 4K was just some incidental feature that games couldn't render at, and wasn't a focus for Nintendo, then how did that become something multiple sources talked to Bloomberg about, to the point that it was treated as a real system feature instead of a mostly irrelevant technical detail? How would that it make it through, but not the easily communicable fact that it was using the same TX1+ chip with higher clocks (both things which SDK documentation would have stated explicitly)? And that not only didn't make it through, but ended up explicitly contravened by Bloomberg's March reporting that the 2021 system would use a new Nvidia chip. Again, there was probably some conflation somewhere, but "does the thing you have use the same old chip or a new one" is an easy question to get right if you have 11 or more sources. I'm also not sure Nintendo even would have undertaken the project of distributing separate SDKs and tools to a limited audience (which we've never seen leaked, despite the fact that lots of developer supposedly had it, and despite the fact that it would have been cancelled out from under them) for such a revision.
I could go on, but I'm not organizing my thoughts well already. Basically, the combination of DisplayPort settings, SoC support, and dock support is interesting, but the notion of "4K Mariko OLED" as a product doesn't quite fit with other things we know, and is not enough to untangle the mess of reporting around 2021 hardware (let alone the vast gulf of bullshit we need to cross to understand its mutation into the reporting on 2022-2023 hardware). I can still see a more minimal version of your explanation, where Nintendo did intentionally add 4K support to the OLED model and firmware, but had no plans to expose it as a real system feature, in which case it wouldn't have merited a limited audience of third party tool distribution and wouldn't have caused any of the reporting we got.
I've had a look for photos of the 2019 Switch model's motherboard, but haven't been able to find any that show enough detail to identify whether individual pins are wired up.
iFixit posted a comparison photo between the two boards, but only of one side of the board, and the USB-C hardware (and traces) are on the other side, unfortunately. I think it's a fairly safe bet that it doesn't have all four lanes wired up, though, because the "external_display_full_dp_lanes" flag is false for IcosaMariko, and in both the Icosa and Aula cases the value of this flag correctly matches up to the underlying hardware.
I had forgotten that the 11 developers article came out after the OLED model was announced, although I would still expect that the conversations may have happened over many months, it's definitely possible that there was come cross-over with Drake development, particularly if he asked any sources again after the OLED announcement to confirm. I suppose the thing I can't get my head around is that in 2021, over two years before the launch of [redacted], there would be so many dev kits in the wild that 11 different developers would be willing to talk to a single journalist about it. You'd need dozens and dozens of developers having dev kits in hand to the point where 11 of them would be willing to spill the beans to a single journalist, and that doesn't make much sense to me for a T239-based console over two years away.
I could definitely see a handful of third party devs knowing about and having dev kits for [redacted] at that point, but it would really be limited to teams making exclusive software for it, and maybe a few other third parties that Nintendo has a good relationship with and is looking for feedback from. It's probably a single-digit number of third parties at that point, and they're ones who are probably much less likely to leak. Zynga, for example, definitely doesn't fit in either of those categories and there's no way they'd need over two years to port a mobile game to a T239-based system.
I can definitely see there being a mix of Aula and [redacted] devs in his reporting. I believe his first reference to third parties working on a 4K-capable Switch was in
this article in August 2020, citing a 2021 launch. It doesn't seem plausible that anyone could have expected a T239-based console to launch in 2021, even if dev kits were out there back then, but it does line up with a 4K Aula. If Nintendo did plan a 4K Aula, then there's every reason to expect that dev kits would have been in third parties' hands by that point, particularly as the hardware required for them was plentiful. By the 2021 reporting some of the people he was talking to may have been talking about [redacted], and things got muddled between the two.
Regarding the 4K becoming a talking point, I expect that if the console was able to output 4K this would have absolutely been stated in the tech sheet, and even though I wouldn't expect games to render at native 4K, I didn't mean to say there wouldn't be games that render at somewhat higher than 1080p and leverage the 4K output (I mean, very few if any PS4 Pro games rendered in native 4K, but it didn't stop it from being the main selling point). I also think you're over-estimating the technical expertise of both mainstream journalists and many game developers. Most people didn't even know that the 2019 revision had a die-shrunk SoC (I've regularly seen references to it having a "bigger battery"), and from the point of view of the people working on it, I could absolutely see them saying that Aula had a new SoC, because Mariko
was a new chip that allowed for higher performance over the original Switch. Whether it was already in use in the 2019 revision isn't something they necessarily knew or cared about.
Also, regarding dev kits, we know that ADEV development kits for Aula exist. Software, SDK and tools differences would have been relatively minor, as they're largely configuration changes in terms of supported clock speeds and output resolution, so the "cancellation" would have been a software update that removes the additional performance modes and 4K output, and leaves devs with a relatively boring Switch OLED model dev kit, so there's not much to show.
I'm not sure this really resolves the Bloomberg reporting so much as possibly add a bit more flavor as to how the conflation may have happened. Aside from the initial preparing for 4k report, those all pretty unambiguously had some Drake details in the mix.
That said, it is interesting that this capability seemingly managed to survive to the retail version. By the time Aula began to show up in the retail firmware, it had already seemingly been stripped of any additional power it may have once had, so it's possible this is just something that was just considered harmless enough that it wasn't worth redoing the motherboard over. Whether they ever communicated this capability to third parties is up for debate, though if they did, it may help to explain a few details around the margins (though certainly not any events that supposedly happened after the system's release).
It's too bad. 4k output is the one thing that could have made Switch OLED worth buying for me.
Yeah, I could definitely see there being a cross-contamination with early reports of [redacted]. I'm not really sure at what point the motherboard would have been finalised, but certainly there's a point where it's not worth going back and removing a handful of traces. I'd be curious if anyone with experience in electronics would have any idea of what the timeline is for finalising PCB designs for a device like this, as it might give us an idea of how late they were still considering 4K support.
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