Why in the world is WSJ still talking about 18 million for this fiscal year? Even 18 million for FY3/2017 and FY3/2018 combined would be a stretch, because that would be 15.26 million during this fiscal year. Nintendo cannot possibly produce that many units. If they could, they would not have only shipped 1.96 million during Q1. They would've shipped over 3 million, like with the Wii.

I don't trust anything Nintendo says about supply. When it comes to judging, and then meeting demand for their hardware, they're either totally imcompetent, or totally full of shit about what's going on. Maybe both.

Production requires time, labour and resources. There is only so much time, so much the people can work, and so many resources that are available.

Yes. So? They haven't fixed their supply problem and they are running out of time for excuses. Sony was able to do it sooner, so can Nintendo. If they put the money in, that is.

I'm just saying it's possible that they have been increasing production compared to their original projections. 

Either way, I don't think we'll see supply meet demand sadly enough

I doubt it's a huge assembly line, but there definitely are some lol... I watched a tear-down of a Switch and the interior had fingerprints on it.

I had assumed the process would be entirely automated, but apparently not.

You also got the workers in Africa getting paid shit wages to get the resources that are used.

If Nintendo makes a Super Mario Odyssey bundle and makes sure there's ample supply, then they're golden.

I believe not. My theory is that those were just units they were gonna store to save for future game launches (MK8D, Arms, Spla2n), but they decides to ship them ASAP to meet demand/beat their expectations on the short term. That's why we saw them use air fright to ship systems overseas (instead of the usual sea fright), and why we saw very low numbers in April through May.

But just my theory.

Well I hate to sound like a broken record here but in this instance there's been a global shortage of NAND flash memory components key to the Switch's production.  So increasing production has been a challenge.  In the 2 or 3 times this happened in the past with regards to their consoles (both handheld and home), they came in conservative at launch and ramped up production in a hurry, though with the Wii demand was just outrageous.  They likely planned the same here, but upping production requires negotiating new contracts with component suppliers and the shortage has made that quite difficult.