There is a new reality among the consoles, and that's the mid-gen upgrade. As someone who's actually rather excited to get the Scorpio (I don't have the xbox1 nor do I have a 4k player so it seems worth whatever price they slap on it to me personally, though if I had an Xbox1 I'd likely feel differently) I certainly can't claim to be totally against it, though I do wonder how they'll ever make a clean break with the current generation as it seems it would be prohibitively expensive to outperform these mid-gen improvements unless they wait quite a few years.
Regardless, as someone who's had the Switch for over a month now and has really fallen in love with it, I must admit I've been thinking about how it already trails the PS4 and Xbox 1 (let alone PS4 Pro and Scorpio) in regards to hardware performance and, while its size and price makes that reasonable, an upgrade within a few years is seemingly necessary if they want to encourage the porting of many 3rd party games to their system. Given that they actually have a history of console upgrades (such as the RAM increase on the N64) and have routinely upgraded their handhelds for ages now (can't help but notice people don't seem particularly bothered that a few 3DS games are only compatible with the New 3DS), I feel that it is rather inevitable that Nintendo will join this mid-gen improvement practice.
My main concern for Nintendo is their rather reasonable but limiting business practice, it being their refusal to sell their consoles at a loss. Granted, their timing with the Tegra X1 was somewhat poor as they likely wanted to establish their console before this holiday season and the Scorpio's release, but it seems likely that even if timed well with the development of better hardware the Switch will be rather limited in its attempt to not be prohibitively expensive.
So anyway, I was just wondering if anyone thinks this might be an option: Might it be possible to simply sell the tablet and hardware itself, without the Joy-Cons and the dock/adaptor for those of us who already have those? Obviously they'd have to also sell the complete package as well, but if they're able to establish a large userbase I think such an option that is compatible with the joy-cons and such that you already own would be rather welcome, especially as they'd be able to slash ~$100+ off the price if they so chose and could make a decent upgrade look less daunting.
It really sounds like something that's quite unlikely to happen, but that sort of swapping has been very welcome in the past... I remember being very, very grateful that the ever-breaking xbox360 could simply swap hard drives from console to console. Really, any chance to not have to buy the same thing all over again would be most welcome, and given the uniquely high costs of the joycons and rather high number of peripherals, the Switch seems the perfect console to lop those redundancies out of the final price, thereby allowing for a better upgrade without breaking the bank.
Is such a thing possible? I have to imagine for some things, such as the dock, it would be quite difficult to make the new model fit it properly, but it might be worth the effort.
