I don't understand much of this stuff, but do you guys think the Switch 2's rumored specs are strong enough to last until 2033?
That is, without any Pro-like revisions.
I'm basing this on Switch 1's 8 year lifecycle.
Short version: never underestimate the software feature set being able to future proof older hardware.
Longer version: You probably remember the impossible Switch ports. Games like Witcher 3 were eventually able to run on the Switch 1, but it took significant downgrades and significant frame rate issues in the biggest regions. But then, more recently, we have seen very impressive releases such as Nier Automata and Dying Light that showcase a much better visual comparison with PS4/XB1, without sacrificing much in terms of frame rates (Nier went from very unstable 40-60 fps on PS4/XB1 to a mostly stable 30 fps on Switch, and Dying light is 30 fps on all systems which is mostly stable according to DF). What happened to make the conversions so much more competent? The answer, in both cases, is TAAU: a temporal anti-aliasing method used to upscale the native resolution from a lower resolution to a higher one. It allows Switch to run at a lower internal resolution, which eases the rendering cost, and to let the upscaling method produce a competently upscaled image with much less rendering cost. This is how Switch 1 got so close to PS4/XB1 in these games. Now, TAAU is a pretty new method, and was not available for older ports. So what you see here is that software advances allowed for Switch 1 to punch above its previous weight.
Switch 2 is believed from the get-go to be able to punch above its weight. DLSS is the main feature discusses for this, but also in terms of ray-tracing it has an advantage of using dedicated RT cores and using ray reconstruction (a machine learning-based method for improving ray tracing quality). Some her even believe that Switch 2 could have RT capabilities on par with PS5. More importantly, though, for gen 9 games, the Switch 2 has the capacity to run at lower native resolutions than PS5/XSX and use DLSS to get a very competent output image, kind of similar to how TAAU narrowed the raw performance gap by smart use of upscaling software. Of course, PS5 and XSX also use FSR for upscaling, but DLSS has a better quality output and especially works better at lower native resolutions. And of course expectations for Switch 2 aren't that it matches PS5/XSX resolutions anyway. So for gen 9, Switch 2 is in a very good position.
Now the question is: what about gen 10 when it comes around in late 2028? Here, we have to guess a lot. Firstly, we don't know what raw specs are reasonable, since node shrinks are providing less and less improvement, and it might be that the raw performance gap will be smaller than the gen 8 -> gen 9 transition. However, at the same time we should probably expect AMD to have dedicated AI hardware in their systems by then, and either AMD or Playstation and Microsoft themselves will develop a more competent AI upscaler similar to DLSS, which is better than FSR. So it is unclear how much of an advantage there will be left based on the AI algorithms like DLSS and ray reconstruction that Switch 2 will have. The same question mark is there for ray tracing: how much worse will Switch 2 be at it compared to gen 10? Despite that, during 2028-2031, I would expect games to run on PS5/XSX/XSS still, and especially the latter system makes targeting Switch 2 in addition a bit easier. For sure there will be plenty of gen 10 games that won't run on Switch 2, and 2031-2033 will be worse in that regard.
So yeah, for gen 9 Switch 2 is very well positioned, but for gen 10 we simply don't know: are games going to target 8K, for example? Probably not, but if they are aiming for higher than 4K resolutions, then that gives Switch 2 a leg up in terms of getting gen 10 games (at much lower resolutions). In general, it is too early for us to say anything very definitive for gen 10, other than that it will be much more difficult to port such games than it would be for gen 9 games, of course.