The way it looks, if you're interested in Wii U (or PS4) Switch may not be the system for you. But for the rest of us...

im pointing out we have a clue of their first year expectations.

After wii u price and manufacturing cost due to tablet controller fiasco, Nintendo must have provided for the future to be able to cut switch price without sacrificing profits...

It's doesn't do me a honor to say that as a consumer, but thinking from business perspective, selling switch at 299$ for a specific time interval and then drop it to 249$ is great...

Sell as much as you can at 299$ and theν cut it to 249$, you earn more money and people will appreciate that you're willing to slash the price to make them purhasin  your product... Instead of having it at 249$ from the beginning and leave it there for years, as you may cannot lower it...

Eerly adopters are early adopters because they can afford to be... They shouldn't complain!

I agree; the same strategy burned me on the PS4P, but it makes sense for the company.

you cant use component shipment numbers to extrapolate end product shipping targets.

1 component shipped does not always equal 1 unit sold.

For example, a pallet of 5000 lcd's arrives, a few may be faulty out of the box, others may not pass quality control after the console has been assembled and is in the testing bed before packaging, a fair portion will be retained or shipped to the factory handling repairs and warranty, and a fair portion will be assigned to non-retail units, such as retail displays, demo units and kiosks, and then you have batches of units sent to third party companies to be used in promotions and giveaways.

If they ship 10m by the end of the year, i expect only 8-8.5m of that to end up on shelves in retail product.

I dont think its an unreasonable number, 3DS shipped 15 million by the end of 2011 so i think 10 million is doable for Switch.

My thoughts on Nintendo's plan, or what they should do have been this.

Release at $299. Stay at that price until holiday season. Then release a bundle for the holiday season at $299. Maybe something liek Mario Kart Delux Bundle.

Then come next March, do a price cut to $249.

Then at next March you have a console with a great selection of games available and at a desirable $250 mark.

They have to prepare for a runaway success even if it doesn't happen so agreements on inventory of components have to be agreed. If it then turns out due to low demand obviously the order won't happen but preparation is key. Nintendo clearly thought the wii u would do very well and it didn't and again here their expectations may not happen either. It may be the next order of LCD panels is only 2 million for example.

I think this is a possibility but will absolutely be decreased or increased based on sales in March / April. We'll know in April if this will remain a solid performer or fizzle out similar to WiiU.

I think Holiday 2017 is key to them for achieving the goal of getting at least 90% of those shipments sold in 2017. I think they can easily manage this if they play there cards right which they've been able to do in the past. Though as long as it gets Pokémon this year then... they might need more than 10 million if their 3 biggest and best selling IP's are getting major main series releases all in just the first 9 months of this systems release.