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Kakadu18 on 12 November 2021
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Dulfite said:

I was curious so I did some numbers. All sold numbers are adjusted for inflation from the midway point of said console's life. All are based on original prices, not taking discounts and new iterations into account, assuming they roughly balance each other out.

Wii - 101.64 mil, $322 each, $32.7b
DS - 154.90 mil, $192.70 each, $29.895b

Total Revenue from hardware - $62.595 billion

Switch - 130mil + with $300 price tag by mid point (2021) is $39 billion.

Total Revenue from hardware - $39 billion

If these numbers are correct, then it would take them selling a whopping 210 million Switches to make hardware revenue from the Wii + DS era. But what about profit?

According to:

Detructoid, Nintendo profited $6 per Wii sold, or $610 million.

I can't find profit data on DS, so let's assume it's more than Wii. If $10 per sold, that's $1.55 billion.

Cinemablend, Nintendo profits $40 per Switch sold, or (based on projection of 130 million sold), $5.2 billion.

So, unless these profit numbers are off, it looks like the Switch already passed up the total profitability of Wii/DS for hardware when it hit 56 million Switch's sold.

At the start the Switch production for each unit was $257, console and dock together at $167 and the joy-cons at $45 each. After the first 10mil units it became even more profitable. They're probably making over $100 profit per unit now.

The last fiscal year ending March 2021 was Nintendo's most profitable ever btw, topping the peak year of the DS and Wii by far, but that's mostly due to software, digital having higher profit margins and DLC.

From the Nintendo Switch Wikipedia article:

Nintendo affirmed that the Switch would be profitable from launch during its 2016 fiscal year earnings report, as the company saw the console as a key earnings driver for 2017 and beyond.[154] Fomalhaut Techno Solutions, a Japanese product teardown firm, estimated that the Switch cost $257 to make compared to its $299 MSRP, with the console and dock at $167 while each Joy-Con costs $45.[155] Kimishima said that they may be able to see further profitability on the Switch when they can achieve volume discounts on components once they reach a level of about 10 million Switch units.