It will need either a redesign (to lower costs) or have its price dropped mightily to achieve such a feat. On top of that, it will also have to have a steady diet of great... no legendary software because that, along with low price point, is what always helped Nintendo's handhelds sell for such long periods of time.

I think we're a long way from seeing these things bear out and won't know for years whether they will.

There's one major flaw - you completely ignore overlap. How many Wii owners were also DS owners? How many Gamecube owners were also GBA owners? N64 and Gameboy?

With the Switch, everyone that previously bought 2 different consoles now only buy one.

One more thing - the Switch is likely to remain the most expensive Nintendo handheld in a long time. Now, you can certainly sell a lot even with a higher price, but (and this is mostly based on speculation) - I believe quite a lot of Nintendo handheld sales are from people buying it twice or even thrice. I have two main pieces of evidence for this. The first being merely anectdotal, it's simply that everyone I know who has ever owned a nintendo handheld has owned multiple models of that exact same handheld. The second piece of data that suggests this is Nintendo handhelds and handhelds in general having ridiculously low attach rates. One possible explanation for this would be that quite a large part of the userbase double or triple dip on hardware, but don't match that with an increased software purchasing. With its price being higher than any other Nintendo handheld, fewer people will double or triple dip.

I was going to write a long comment about why these points aren't very compelling, but eh, i'll just say : no.

These are the kind of prediction threads that make people remember you on this site. As a Nintendo fan, I hope you're right.

The math doesn't really add up. The PS4 audience is very much different from the 3DS audience while the Switch audience is very much the same as the 3DS audience.

Your math will add up if the majority of PS4 owners buy a Switch, which is hard to argue for. Buyers will have to come from somewhere. To achieve that the Switch would have to get all of the dormant players who completely skipped Gen7 and haven't moved on to mobile or other platforms.

Wii numbers could be possible at this point. More then that, i'm not sure.

I see Wii/PS1, maybe even original Game Boy levels.
But DS/PS2? I don't think so.

Maybe if they do NS2 right, then perhaps it's possible.

It didn't take long for people to become drunk on a little Nintendo success.

It depends their business moves. As Kimishima said, they want it to sell as good as the Wii. Anything below that and Nintendo would consider it a failure - obviously! They never sold less than 85m consoles in a generation (after the NES) and this gen was a disaster for them. I don't trust Nintendo to make all the right decisions but 100-150m is the ballpark for me. They need to outsell the Wii and they'll want to aim at DS numbers.

I would say not too much!? GC sold 23m while GBA sold 81m, Wii U sold 13m while 3DS will be around 75m at end.

Switch will definatly have multiply revisions and difrent type of hardwares, so people will also buy multiply Switch.

Also, Switch with big 3rd party AAA games in full handheld mode can be and alredy becoming quite popular and for people that are not Nintendo fans.