I hope you aknowledge the difference between fans and fanboys but it's hard to tell from your post.

You're totally right, it's far more reasonable to compare one company's home console's sales to another company's home console sales plus their handheld sales, because Sony never actually entered the handheld market for around another decade. It's not like before I was comparing one Nintendo home console and one Nintendo handheld to another Nintendo home console and another Nintendo handheld from two different time frames, and this time I'm comparing two home consoles that competed head to head over the same time frame.

This is absolutely ridiculous. You think I'm moving the goalposts? Try and pay attention to what's actually happening.

A decline in overall sales perhaps not, but the industry was much smaller if you're talking early 1990s/1980s. 

A decline in Nintendo's overall influence/sway on the market ... if that was his general point, then he is mostly correct on that. 

Nintendo went from being the no.1 console maker and a huge a force in the console business and having a virtual monopoly on a sizable portable market to being a virtual non-factor in the console business today and while they do have a solid performer in the 3DS, ignoring the damage done to that market sector by smart devices is like trying to ignore an elephant sitting in a room. 

I mean at this stage, Nintendo basically has no home console market, which is an embarrassing fall from grace given their history in the market. It would be like Coca-Cola becoming almost locked out of the Cola market, even if they had a Quaker Oats division or something doing well, it's still a fairly bad situation. 

No question that since the Playstation has shown up, Nintendo's console presence has been gradually whittled away aside from a 4 year blip, now down to almost nothing. As someone who's been a Nintendo fan since the 1980s and actual was around for when the peak of the NES and SNES eras, what they've been reduced to today is sad, but it's tempered a bit because they've made so many stupid decisions over the course of the last 20 years, that it's hard not to conclude that they basically deserve to be where they are. 

They've completely and utterly mismanaged their console division from a leadership position to straight down the toilet. You don't get here by accident. 

PSP doesn't really sting Sony nearly as badly, PSP was like a fun spin-off try for Sony, it was never the centerpiece of the Playstation brand nor do they have any real history in the portable segment. 

Your original argument was that sales of Nintendo hardware (you included handhelds) has had a huge decline since Playstation came about. Rol and I then showed you the decline has not been huge, 3DS+Wii U is down something like 15-20% compared to GB+SNES in the same time frame.

You then went on to say Playstation started dominating around 97/98, which I then disproved by showing that Nintendo shipped more hardware than Sony did in the late 90s.

Then you changed your argument to PS1 sold about twice as much as N64 in the 90s.

That is a textbook example of changing goalposts, coming up with new arguments as the converstion goes on.

It has. 20-25% is a huge decline.  I apoligize that I was wrong on how dramatically it had declined, but still, losing 20-25% of sales all the while your competion's sales have generally increased is clearly not good.

Coming up with new arguments as the conversation goes on is called "having a conversation". What you call moving the goal posts is nothing more than presenting further evidence to argue my point of the obvious decline of Nintendo's sales. That was my original point. From there I provided additional evidence to back up my point, showing how from console to console, Nintendo's sales have declined. I further elaborated on that point by providing further evidence, going so far as to point out where I feel Nintendo lost it's grip as an industry leader - during the life of the PS1.

During this time, it was you that countered with differing ways of obfuscating the fact that Nintendo's sales have generally declined, first by arguing that Nintendo's sales have been generally constant, then when that was demonstrated to be false, arguing that the decline overall wasn't actually that bad, and even going so far to cherry pick certain fiscal years to fit your narrative. In the meantime, I have been comparing like to like. I have compared the sales of Nintendo's latest handheld and home console with the sales of Nintendo's handheld and home console the last time that Nintendo was clearly dominant. The same argument could easily be made if you compare home console to home console and handheld and handheld. The fact that I combined them was essentially irrelevant. However, you then took advantage of the fact that I combined the two, ingnoring the point I was actually making by doing so, and decided to obfuscate sales data time and time again by combining sales of various Nintendo consoles, and cherry picking annual sales ina  dishonest way to argue a position that is obviously incorrect.

Remember, it was you that suggested that Nintendo's sales actually outstripped that of Sony's, by combining the sales of two devices and comparing them to the sales of one device, yet you suggested that I moved the goalpost by countering your point by making what is obviously a fairer comparison that being - PS1 sales vs N64 sales over their first 3 years in which the N64 initally outsold the PS1, followed by PS1 dominance. Don't accuse me of moving the goalpost by directly countering a point that you made.

Like I said before, try and pay attention to what is actually happening.

There is a HUGE gap in his reasoning. Literally.

Sorry about that. My infant son apparently found the enter key without me realizing it.

Having a balance between hardware lines is also something to be accounted for.

Having a hardware split of 65 million handhelds to 14 million consoles is not healthy.

The SNES-Game Boy splits where you had more like 49 million SNES and 50+ million Game Boys is a much healthier division of hardware. I'd much rather have the situation of the SNES + Game Boy than what Nintendo has today. 

Nintendo is basically a portable game maker these days (by market performance) and its reflective in the Switch's design.

Let's not kid ourselves, this generation has been very bad for Nintendo.

Not only is Wii U obviously a catastrophe, but 3DS will be their worst selling handheld besides the Virtual Boy, and won't even outsell the loser of last gen's portable race.

Now, that's not to say Switch is doomed; it could do quite well if they price it reasonably and provide it with a consistent stream of desirable software. But let's not pretend the last few years have been hunky dory for them.

The 3DS is dirt cheap and has been for a long time, I don't think low price makes as much of a difference as people think. 

Obviously you want a decent price point but I think it's an overrated concept, if pricing a system correctly was all it took to have success, there'd be lots of successful platforms, GameCube, Dreamcast, Neo Geo Pocket, and others among them.