you all know by now how I feel about them cheaping out on the display but over time I've come to accept that it's a sensible strategy. rather, at the very least it is congruent with a highly speculative guess of a sensible strategy:
- making a more powerful switch is proving difficult for nintendo and nvidia due to power and size constraints
- the solution is to make a physically larger system to afford more battery volume and cooling hardware
- this inherently makes the device less appealing as a portable device to the mass market
- it also inherently makes the device more expensive
- accordingly costs need to be cut to bring the product down to a preferred price
- since handheld mode is already less appealing, a cheaper, but bigger for design and marketing purposes, panel is used
- the cherry on top: the OLED model already set a precedent that can be fulfilled when they manage to get the full package smaller and lighter
for now I'm going to solidify my guess that the new system is coming in calendar Q1 2025 (February or March) and will be followed in holiday 2027 by the concurrent launches of two models: an OLED model that is the same size as, or nominally smaller than, the 2025 model and a Lite that also has an OLED display. I think this is also when we get a new Animal Crossing, a perfect fit for a realistically portable device for smaller hands.
