I'm talking app wise. When I have an app or a song on my iphone, I can take it with me on any idevice i buy after. When I buy an app or game on a game console, the only way to play that game in future consoles is through BC. Same with some apps and games on PC. Even if it takes come nudging, you can get them to run. When you buy a game on Steam and get a new PC or laptop, that game follows you as long as you have an account. That is BC to me.

That's a silly perspective, just because some people can't use the internet for streaming, no one should? Please, get real. I offered the alternative of actively porting the predecessors libraries to the following console, but doing that would be the a lot more expensive. Meanwhile, game streaming is proven, working, and commercial software since 2009.

Of course they are making money.

What are you talking about?

But they have made a large amount of investments the past few years and have

been hit with currency issues.  

Its like when you personally invest in a house or car, guess what, you are operating on a loss until you pay it off.

But you are still making money.

You already mentioned in another post, that you mean BC digitally. So, let's assume next Nintendo-console has an eShop that keeps using NNID (and as I see it Nintendo intends to use it). So they can detect which games/apps youpurchased on Wiiu. They could make them available for redownload, if these are ported to the new console. Porting stuff to the new platform should be easy enough, even if hey switch the CPU-architecture. But still there is no guarantee that they do it, even less that 3rd-parties will do that. Look at virtual console. There is no echnical reason, why they didn't release all games for VC-platforms they have done already on WiiU, that there available on Wii-VC or 3DS-VC. There might be licensing issues, but that involves Nintendo-games too. The only reason might be, that they want to use VC-titles to fill the lineup.

So: technical possible, still probably not happening.

I suggest you look up the meaning of "net income" and "operating income" and then go look at Nintendo's fiscal year ends for the last three years. 

If Nintendo has already chosen an ARM CPU + GPU (Qualcomm) combo for their next handheld they may as well start porting some Wii U games over. 

DKC: Tropical Freeze would be my first suggestion since I think it under performed massively on the Wii U. 

That's the thing; they shouldn't have to port it. Porting isn't backward compatability. It's just porting. You don't keep your progress with a port. What I'm talking about is like how on the 3DS, you can still buy DSi games. If you had DSiware on your DSi, all you need is your old SD card and those games are tranferred over. No issues at all with licencing because they aren't going anywhere. Nothing new is happening to those games. There are just more playforms that can access that store now.

How is there no technical reason? The Super Mario Bros. on the Wii U VC has different data than the 3DS one which has different data than the Wii one. They may look the same, but they are not the same. There obviously is a technical reason, because making three different identical versions of the same game when you could have just one is stupid. I there was no technical boundry, no indie game like shovel knight would have a Wii U and 3DS version. There would just be an eshop version, and that would be the end of it.

But here's the twist...you can. Its trivial to transfer save data between ports let alone games on different systems, its just not done out of "laziness" for lack of a better term

On the topic of ARM vs x86 performance lets look at AMDs upcoming ARM Cortex A57 based low power server chip.

Both the PS4 and XBOne have 8 Core Jaguar at a lower clock so that should give you an idea or the relative performance. In a few years a 8/16 Core customised ARM chip could beat the PS4/XBOne's CPUs easy. And then they could use a dual or quad core downclocked chip for the handheld.

But what about GPU which matters a whole lot more than CPU relative to gaming?

Well ARM cores tend to take up less die space (x86 has a lot of legacy bloat from the decades of iteration) so that leaves more room for a better GPU. And ARM also is cheaper to licnese than X86 so probably end up being quite a bit cheaper so that leaves more money in the budget for other things like the GPU. Naturally over time with die shrinks (slowed down somewhat but in a few years should be at least 1 or two proper shrinks from what is available now) and improved architectures it becomes cheaper and easier to get more GPU performance in lower TDPs and die sizes.