What should Nintendo have done instead of Wii U?

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h2ohno said:
A Wii 2 would have done much better than the Wii U for various reasons. Not having the gamepad would go a long way towards undoing the confusion over whether it was a new console or a peripheral. It would have had much more appeal. Not having the gamepad would also have made the system cheaper.

Not sure if a Wii 2 could match the success the Switch has had the last 3 years or the success of the original Wii, but it would have sold much more than the Wii U, and the technology for a system like the Switch simply didn't exist in 2012.

The other big thing they should have done was make the system more powerful, especially its CPU. There is no excuse for releasing a system with a CPU that weak in 2012. GPU, RAM, and bandwidth should have been improved as well, but the CPU was the biggest problem. The early 3rd party games would have fared much better if the CPU was up to snuff. Even if they still used the PowerPC architecture they should have been able to manage that. And with the money saved on the gamepad there'd be more financial leeway to improve the system's specs.

Wii U's CPU (Espresso) was sacrificed on the altar of backwards compatibility and power consumption. In order for it to natively play Wii games they stuck with the exact same architecture, which dated back to the Gamecube, and in order to keep power use to a minimum they kept its clocks quite low.