Rumors like these only get attention because of how ludicrous they are.
I honestly hope no one believes this. That would be a sad day.

I stopped reading in the $149 price. It's so ridiculous.

That kind of a price point doesn't mean even remotely close to PS4 hardware in 2016, it does however likely mean a 3DS/Wii U hybrid box, in a smaller case than Wii U coming out in 2016.

I doubt this would be Nintendo's next home console, more like the unification of home and handheld platforms, into a single SOC, that can then be included in the 9th gen home console.

As far as 9th gen goes, unless Nintendo gets their share of the pie of 3rd party sales they are going to find gaining any part of the market difficult, even risk losing what little sales they currently have from hardware.

Sony has shown that gamers are more than willing to pay for reasonable specs if the price is right, a system that's capable of achieving good quality modern graphics, accessible to a very big audience of gamers.

There's no reason why Nintendo can't approach that with their next system a year prior to the release of the next Playstation, because all of the same technology Sony would use is available to all platform holders. Provided Nintendo makes platform exclusive games that appeal to the 3rd party audience they can] claw back a better market share and indies have shown that developing those kinds of games doens't have to be expensive, it just requires good, universally usable tools (which are clearly available to everyone now) and creative thinking in how you approach developing games (techniques being pioneered by many modern developers).

3rd parties would definitely support Nintendo, if they felt Nintendo were worth supporting, but Nintendo needs to work to get that back, they need to prove that they have an audience on their system that will buy 3rd party games, which was lost with poor hardware choices when Nintendo made N64 and decided to stick with cartridges, instead of going with bigger media storage and not think about the costs to publishers.

Gamecube was a similar deal with it's propritary discs (not so costly, but still lacking in storage compared to DVD), again Nintendo lacked games that appealed to the wider audience too.

If Nintendo just approaches 3rd party, asks them what hardware they want in their next platform, start investing in more western focused games and plan to have a bunch of titles to release steadily from release in 2017 or 2018 when they release, along with developing tools in conjunction with 3rd party to make development easy across the board, maybe joining Khronos Vulkan if they haven't already then they could set themselves up in a good place to appeal to more external publishers in the future.

hard to believe they will be able to create a console with at least the power of the Wii U plus an additional gimmick for $149. I'll be impressed.

Exactly. Throw resources at something similar to the Wii U and call it new? Just no. If pricepoint was such a big factor, they would have dropped the Gamepad from newer SKUs by now.

The Shield Console is more powerful than the Wii U (500 GFLOPS with 3GB of RAM) and retails for $199.99, sold at a fat, fat profit margin becaue Nvidia doesn't make money off games. 

Depends on how expensive the gimmick is, but I suspect Nintendo learned their lesson on expensive gimmicks this gen. 

so, GC to wii hardware jump, also drop the gamepad (the main reason to help the price, compared to wii U) and bring other gimmick.
If they gimmick was as revolutionary as wii, it can work.

hope for wii U BC.

You're right, but if they make a console just a bit more powerful than Wii U, it would get literally 0 third party support. Not that they care a lot, but this would be bizarre.

Unless this thing is a handheld... then it would be possible and good.

If it's a unified concept where the handheld & console share a library that it will likely have 3rd party support, just not the kind PS/XB are use to. They will be devices with Nintendo published software+Japanese support+kid/family friendly titles+strong indie support. That combined will easily give Nintendo 100+ games per year.

That's what they did with GC to Wii. Wii was basically a redesigned/rebranded GC with a simple to use controller and casual friendly software. NX could be to Wii U, what Wii was to GC.