You're completely ignoring the price factor. 3DS is the biggest seller among the Nintendo hardware and its price is less than a third of the PS4. Even the Wii U is a lot cheaper than PS4 and XB1. If they are at the same price level which would happen for a competitive console next-gen PS and Xbox consoles would easily outsell them.

Not to mention that the library of PS4 and XB1 hasn't come on its own yet, and once they do both the consoles will sell a lot more.

But you gotta remember that that's a lot of cross buying; people that already own a Wii U is likely to also own a 3DS... I mena, a lot of thesales of the 3DS is due to people owning more than one of those...

Thanks :)

1) I'd agree if moving over to unified memory and advanced, but cheap (if production starts somewhere between July-August 2018) processing technology wasn't easily accessible to them.

It also benefits their own developers.

The past choices only became stupid in hindsight, like N64's cartridge tech, cartridges had been standard for multiple generations and CD had been very expensive prior to PS1 coming out.

Gamecube didn't really have any stupid hardware querks.

Wii was the market leader and it's tech appealed to the masses, outside of the normal gamer crowd, so I'd argue that it's not necessarily stupid what Nintendo has done, at least from a perspective of the kind of technology they've used in their platforms.

X86 becoming a standard within the console market hasn't happened until the 8th gen, it's likely one of the primary reasons why Wii U doesn't get 3rd party support. Nintendo actually wanted 3rd party support for the Wii U, which is apparent from Reggie's comments when Wii U was unveiled, maybe it was all marketing fluff and no actual action (which is one stupid moment for Nintendo I'll give you,  given that devs later said that Nintendo's support for their hardware to external studios was very much lacking) to make the 3rd party/Nintendo relationship a solid one, but from a business and importantly a financial point of view if Nintendo wants money, then they need to develop their next system to work for all of their potential developer base.

Wii U appeals to Indies and Indies are the future too, so even if Nintendo looks to appease both their own studios and indies then they need to use technology that makes everyone's lives easier, which means Universal Memory (because of the flexibility that will bring) and obviously the cheaper, but more advanced AMD tech will just be so much better compared to what is currently in use on basically every console and PC.

The benefits of waiting for this memory  and processing architecture to become a thing are glaringly obvious to anyone that even takes a slight interest in the market, Nintendo are apparently looking to hire talented advisors on this, like Mark Cerny type figures to build their next platform, so it just makes sense that they'd use this tech in their next box.

2) We don't hear these rumblings from anyone besides people that don't develop on PS4 and XB1. At PSX the developers were saying that there's a lot of potential for what can be done on PS4, XB1 is similar architecture so by extension it to has a measure of that same potential, there's quite a bit of life left in both boxes, with GPGPU, HSA and all of those features that can be tapped into, that just hasn't happened yet.

Both consoles have the legs to achieve some amazing things 4-5 years from now, optimization has barely started, right now the results we're seeing are from just filling up the resources of each platform, not using them efficiently and refining code to the upteenth degree.

2019 would mean a 6 year standard, which fits with when Sony has released in the past. Sony and Microsoft don't want to P*** Off all of their install base by releasing too soon. The tech in both consoles isn't weak for it's intended market.

I guess it's always possible that with the tech being available to the industry that Sony and Microsoft will bite earlier and release in say 2018, but I just don't buy they'd be willing to annoy their respective install bases. A 5 year generation isn't really necessary when we haven't yet seen what PS4 or XB1 can really do. It's only when technology has been fully taken advantage of and developers can't do anything new with either system that it becomes necessary to release the successor to your current platform.

Yes I did take that into account. Wii U+3DS is at 10.2m this year, if they were unified perhaps sales would be more like 8-9 million or so which is still right between XB1 & PS4.

Never said it was all mario and rainbows but I did say it was mostly mario and kid games. :D It still needs some more adult games. You

Having one game library across all hardware sounds dangerously similar to Sony's port-heavy "console on the go" strategy with their handhelds, and would make it far harder to convince people to buy more than one Nintendo device. Indeed, judging by how the WiiU has been selling compared to it's competition, it seems that even offering unique software built around different devices isn't enough to mitigate that issue. People outside Nintendo's core fanbase seem more than happy enough to just go to the 3DS for their Nintendo games and leave it at that.

I really don't think this strategy is the slam dunk you make it out to be. To me, it seems more to be a necessity borne out of limited resources/manpower--the strategy they've come up with to avoid the constant delays that plagued the WiiU in it's first year. Nor would it mitigate the issue of Nintendo missing out on key third-party software, as several people have pointed out.

"While Nintendo steals the home console show by basically translating its portable victory across all its devices,"

That's my position on price. The first device of many will most likely be a handheld, because the 3DS is the first to need an upgrade. Thus as a handheld I expect it to follow the pricing model of the DS. Why? Because I don't expect it to contain any expensive hardware components (other than CPU and RAM) this time. It will only need to integrate every component in the WiiU (excluding CPU and RAM). The New3DS already laid the foundation for the dual analogue, as well as the NFC reader. They're basically at parity now when it comes to components other than CPU and RAM.

Why would a handheld compete with the home consoles? Because it is a family of meshed devices, no longer standalone. Hence "gamechanger".

There's nothing in OP that an interested or informed reader could miss.

Don't tell me I say garbage. I try my best to write informed pieces that I've thought about thoroughly. Also I recommend reading the thread next time, as I've answered most of it already, specifically about the graphics arms race.