Oh...
People here conclude that pyro says that there is no decline while what he means is that market is declining to normality, not declining to death...

He simply deems 7th gen as an anomaly and for obvious reasons ( compare 6th gen to 7th ) I concur with his aspect!

Did tablets kill pc eventually...? Hmmm, no the market declineδ a lot till to stabilize to a still viable size. ;)

There is a decline, but handhelds aren't dying out like many people here claim. If you leave out the massively successful DS/PSP era things aren't looking as dire.

It's normal that this year is in decline because the 3DS is nearing the end of its lifecycle. It was already underpowered when it came out lol.

Except that "normality" doesn't exist in tech markets and trends like consoles. A market like this will grow or decline but won't stay "normal", it's not sustainable. The usual way to read a graph like this is : "The market grew, attained its peak, and is now declining". And that's the moment when the actors of the industry have to think about something else, either launch something new to help the market grow again, or bet on another growing market. That's why Nintendo, Sony, Square Enix and a lot of other developers are now going to mobile gaming, and even Nintendo is mixing handheld and home consoles.

Handhelds are not "dying", but are becoming minor compared to the much bigger mobile market, so the industry switches its focus, and the handheld/mobile gap grows. Handhelds could become a niche market in one or two generations if nobody finds a great new product to bring the audience (and the whole industry) back. Not sure if the Switch will be that great new product. 

look at 3ds yearly sales, of course it is declining.
the difference is that 3ds has 7 years, sold less than GBA in 4 years...

I really liked this post, as it points out why we have console generations in the first place. 

Of course they can. It's all about one thing that's called "games". If 3DS isn't selling, it's because of the lack of appealing games.

Not sure what was the point with the smartphones, but as long as we're talking about gaming devices, I'm having hard to see how Apple or Samsung could make a gaming device that would sell 80 million units. For Nintendo, however, I don't see that being a problem when they pull their heads out of their asses.

This sounds like moving the goal posts. I mean, we can always say even Switch was released right before mobile gaming took off, just like the 3DS was. In reality, even DS and PSP were released to an established market of people playing games with their phones. DS and PSP were able to succeed because the games were what people wanted. The thing is, that the games on mobile devices are really bad, but people play them because they are mostly free and there are no better games to play on other systems

Switch is not to make a handheld device, but to make a home system portable. You can take it to a friend and play it there or on the road with a friend - no different than what you did with NES back in the day, when you just grabbed the cartridge and went to a friend (that had a NES) and played the game with him/her.

Annual revenue of the iOS-AppStore + Google Play is around $30 billion dollar, the biggest share of that are mobile games.

You can't seriously compare that to the mobile situation when DS and PSP were released.

And not all "games on mobile devices are really bad", there are a lot of entertaining games on these platforms.

Yes, and the revenue comes mostly from freemium, where there are a handful of people who spend insane amounts of money into the games they play, while the vast majority of people pay nothing.

Yes, I can. It's not any different from the customers perspective. You have the choice to play the games that fit you the best, or you do not play at all. 

Of course, I can't say that all games are bad because I haven't played them all, only the games I have played are bad. I can understand you liking the mobile games if you like the modern games on home consoles, but if you do not like the games, you're likely to dislike the games on mobile, though, you can dislike them for free.

Last year hardware sales were 10M. This year will be around 7M. What normality is that?

I reiterate: the handheld market is declining to death.