That's more the vibe i'm getting, honestly. Unless they've basically thrown out everything they had for the game, i can't see what we saw so far working for a handheld (and NX will at least partially be a handheld, if not entirely).

Here's my thought: after the positive investor response from the DeNa announcement, Iwata went to Aonuma and told him that the pressure's off for us to care that much about Wii U sales this year, so what do you *really* want to do with this game, and Aonuma told him of some of the ideas they had come across while building Zelda U, ideas they had to shelve for development-length purposes. Now they just have the time to go hog-wild.

Maybe Nintendo's holiday anchor is going to be the first batch of mobile games. Maybe they'll just have a few bits of red meat to keep core gamers like us relatively quiet, let the Wii U rot otherwise, and focus their money on mobile and possibly QoL this holiday.

Actually no, it doesn't mean it's "expensive as hell". 

The Tegra X1 (a mobile chip) is releasing next month in a $199.99 console with 3GB RAM, and that's basically a Wii U level performer in a mobile form factor. 

And that's a device sold at a fat profit margin too, Nvidia does not sell anything at a loss (this is partly why they are locked out console contracts, they're not willing to sell their GPUs to MS/Sony/Nintendo as cheaply as AMD does). 

So we're already approaching this level of tech in consumer products today, by late 2016 (say 18 months from now), 300-500 GFLOPS performance from a mobile chip will be the norm and certainly not out of Nintendo's reach. 

I could see both the handheld and console versions releasing at the same time.

November 2016

NX Portable-$199.99, between Xbox 360 & Wii U in terms of performance, 540p

NX Home-$199.99, between Wii U & Xbox One in terms of performance, 1080p

That's because the date we had was 2015.

Wii U isn't even $99.  Your dream world of Nintendo abandoning the Wii U so early isn't going to happen.

I don't think Wii U will ever be $99 (as in an official MSRP). The freaking nine year old PS3 is not even $99 yet. 

So you think $149-$199 will be the lowest it goes before the pull the plug on Wii U?

It won't get there because Nintendo can't afford to put it there like they could with the GameCube. Nintendo's kind of stuck in Wii U manufacturing, due to basically proprietary CPU and memory as well as the gamepad. If the console had taken off, they could afford to order more and get discounts on economies of scale, but they're barely manufacturing them which is a bad combination with the very unique parts they need.

While i don't think NX Home is going to be x86 or anything to normalize with Sony and MS, it is definitely going to be made of off-the-shelf parts or something close to it, at least for the CPU/GPU.

I'm not even sure if 3DS will ever be $99.99 let alone the Wii U, and if the 3DS gets to $99.99 it won't be for a while either. 

I doubt Wii U ever goes (officially) below $150, maybe not even $199.99. 

No one really prices at $99.99 any more ... you can't get even a brand new 360, PS3, Vita, or 3DS for that price, why do would you expect them to sell the Wii U at that cost? 

no way we honestly think NX is coming in 2016????