(Rumor) Nintendo discarded "Switch Pro"

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Alex_The_Hedgehog said:

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So, according to Digital Foundry Nintendo originally considered a "Mid gen Upgrade" for Nintendo Switch, what a lot of people were calling the "Switch Pro". However, they discarded that idea in favor of working on the actual Switch successor.

Now, I don't know how reliable is that source, but if it's true, then I bet we will hear something bigger by the first couple of months in 2023.

I actually thought that this happened. The reason I thought so was twofold: a) The chip crunch and b) NVidia going on saying that they won't develop custom chips for anyone. To go into detail:

When Nvidia said that they won't develop a custom for any clients, there wasn't really any good upgrade possibilities within the Tegra line of chips at the time. The X2 would only have been a minor update, most of which Nintendo got already with the die-shrink of the X1, and Xavier was engineered for AI, with a server/workstation GPU architecture that doesn't fit well into a gaming device and as a result, also here the performance increase would have been minor.

The chip crunch also certainly had a hand in the situation, as getting a new chip on a smaller process would have meant getting pushed back in the line and competing against other manufacturers for production volume when the outdated process of the X1 resulted in fairly limited competition for the process, and as a result, a low volume of chips being produced. Due to this, Nintendo would have been forced to continue producing the "old" Switch for the foreseeable future as their volume model, and as such, the "pro" model simply didn't make any business sense at the time.

Would I have been an exec at Nintendo at the time, I would certainly have done the same. The time just wasn't right for a pro model with everything stacked against it, so putting more time into developing a successor sounds like the right thing to do to me, too.

I also think that the development of a pro model was already fairly advanced when they had to change course. Short of a chip for a new pro model, they just implemented the other new features they wanted to bring along with the better hardware on it's own without the performance upgrade to completely write off the R&D costs that went into it: Enter the Switch OLED.