The 3DS doesn't have a successor because that style of portable/form factor doesn't have much of a future. Smartphones have cannibalized the "kiddie market", there's still space for the 3DS but it's a much more niche market, so Nintendo never bothered to really upgrade it and went straight to Switch which can do things and deliver a scale of experience a smartphone cannot.

So no, the whole "graphics don't matter" stuff is not accurate, if the Switch didn't have a relatively modern chipset it wouldn't be able to run games like Breath of the Wild, and if it didn't have games like that the appeal of the system would be far less impressive and your sales are far less. 

Just because a niche group on these boards loves their itty/bitty small budget DS/3DS style gaming on the go, doesn't mean the general market reacts the same way to that. That doesn't impress a lot of people anymore (even kids). They had their iPad and look at 3DS and go "meh".

I'd think if Nintendo did a 3-year upgrade formula, they'd require 1st and 2nd party devs to use the base Switch as the lead platform and go from there.  The big bonus would be in performance updates for existing games like BotW and Xenoblade 2 as well as the acquisition of 3rd party games that otherwise would not be able to hit the OG Switch.  That is, assuming that they use the upcoming Xavier SoC for a hypothetical Switch 2.

You don't have to "reset to zero" with a new generation. Just maintain backwards compatibility and the whole OG Switch library carries over to the successor. 

Switch is not even on their top sales yet and all of you already thinking of the new replacement LMAO.

That doesn't mean shit from a business POV though, the Wii U had backwards compatibility with the Wii and who showed up to support them for that? *crickets*. Every time you do the old fashion hardware change you leave yourself incredibly vulnerable and consumer loyalty is fickle as hell. One minute they love you, they next minute they love something else.

If I'm Nintendo I'm ditching that whole style of hardware upgrades entirely, it's far too risky especially now that you have no fall back hardware to go back on (imagine where Nintendo would be if Wii U or GameCube happened and there's no 3DS or GBA). 

I'm not risking my entire company on a product transition like that, no way in hell. Nintendo is not MS or Sony either where they have 50 other divisions that can make money if Playstation or XBox doesn't work out. 

The setup PC has is much more sensible for where Nintendo is today, it's ultimately better for the consumer and will be better for Nintendo too. People don't complain because that's simply the way it is and always has been, there are no "generations" in PC gaming. That can work for Switch IMO. 

Wii U's failure had absolutely zero to do with "starting from zero", it had everything to do with plain bad design and marketing decisions.

A cycle where consumers only get 3 years of decent support for their device is not good for consumers, it is terrible for them.

And what gauruntee do you have that a "Switch 2" doesn't have the right design and doesn't have marketing missteps. Zero. The Wii U's failure really was more rooted in consumers growing tired of mini-game-athons that drove Wii to super high sales, you release Nintendo Land 3 years earlier and it sells 20 million, three years later you get treated like crap. Consumers are fickle, you can't bank your company on every console transition going well, Nintendo fails about 50% of the time when they've had hardware transitions. 

I'm not taking that chance if I'm the new Nintendo president, no way. 

It wouldn't have to be 3 years of support either, it would be more like 5-6 years of support, there would still be hundreds if not thousands of games compatible with the OG Switch and probably all of the important Nintendo 1st party games can scale very easily because Nintendo doesn't really aim for realism in their presentation, so it would be straight forward to have say Breath of the Wild 2 (hypothetical) run at 60 fps 1440p (4KTV) on Switch Pro docked versus say 720p on the OG Switch. 

Past that, adopting this model, Nintendo would sell more hardware. Fact is you sell more hardware with more options for the consumer, and significant more options, there's a reason why Apple has like 6 different iPhone models and 6 different iPad models. Consumers *like* the choice, I'm sure there probably is a small group of people who complain/are angry that there are so many iPhones/iPads, but you can't run your damn business listening to this tiny sliver of the marketplace. The fact is it's 2018, not 1980 something, people buy electronics with the understanding that there will be multiple model revisions. 

See I wouldn't have a problem with this concept if I had any faith that the base Switch would still be properly supported after the release of the Pro/1.5, but I have no such faith.

Nintendo will still make sure their games run fine on it, sure, but non-Nintendo releases will end up like Hyrule Warriors on the base 3DS chugging along at 20fps. 

And that may well happen, but you will still get plenty of content to play. It's not like Switch Pro will show up and OG Switch will suddenly get like only 10 games a year. Try several hundred, try probably more than you could ever spend money on or have time to play. 

As a business I can't run my business and put it at risk and also hold back my hardware sales just because of this group of consumer. You have to be reasonable.

Nintendo is already making a fairly large sacrifice in giving you one system that can play basically all their content instead of asking for two (which worked out to like over $500 US), they owe it to themselves to have higher hardware sales and more models will provide that, but they have to be significant upgrades, consumers are not stupid and are not going to go crazy over little dinky New 3DS style upgrades (case in point -- none of the 3DS revisions caused any kind of large boost in fiscal year sales for that product). 

A hybrid between the PC setup and how Apple does business is what's best for Nintendo. It will mitigate risks that come from hardware transitions (that historically have blown up in Nintendo's face half the time) and it will prevent against things like hardware shipment collapse after year 3-4 of every hardware cycle that plagues almost all Nintendo systems, even the successful ones. There's only so many Nintendo IP, and you end up using them up basically by the end of that 3rd year, then you have problems selling hardware. Switch is going to have that same problem.

Getting only 3 years before non-Nintendo games turn to shit and you're left with only the handful or less of worthwhile games Nintendo release per year is horrible for the consumer, you're screwing over what will then be over 50 million paying customers.