I think the Switch is going to get several hardware revisions just like the GBA, DS and 3DS did.  Nintendo is unbeatable in the handheld business.  Since Switch is a hybrid (both home and handheld) they are going to lean on the strategies that come from their handheld side.  That is where they have been the most successful.

It's possible... but there are risks in going that way. Fragmenting your fanbase is a tricky thing. We didn't see very many "New" 3DS games that were successful. Similarly, only a few Game Boy Color games outside of Pokemon were really big. And even Wii games with Motion Plus were hampered by hardware fragmentation.

Unless they've solved this problem, I don't know if that's a good idea. If they can effectively boost the switch through a dock, that may be a way to do it, but as I understand, that's not possible with the hardware.

Maybe, but would this limit how far Nintendo can advance the hardware?  And if so would that make it harder to port games from the next gen systems?

Switch likely wont have any more first party releases this year because of delays both from working from home and Nintendo's high internal standards. They will ride the animal crossing momentum as long as they can, but it will dry out eventually.

Eh... I'm not really seeing the connection between this and the OP.  There's already a topic about Nintendo's releases for the rest of this year, so if that's what you'd like to discuss, that's the place to do so.

Edit:  Nvm.  Rereading the OP I kind of see the connection.  Still, I think the focus here is more about overall life cycle of the console, so lets keep it there.

I don't think there will be anything on the PS5 that can't be ported to the next Switch, or even this Switch for that matter.  But, the bigger the gap, the more difficult it will be.  

As for the rest of the stuff, I'm too tech illiterate to understand anything beyond SSD.

wow did not mention bayonetta 3... sexist! kidding :P

but yeah i think nintendo might do a second wave of switch.... They only have one console to take care off, so might be very doable

Given the technological age we live, I think the lines between new console short life span vs new iterations long lifespan is a bit tricky. What I hope to see is a "switch 2". Its a switch with a massive power boost. Too powerful to be considered a "switch pro" but expanding off the same technology as the switch, making it 98% backwards compatible w little to no dev effort. Now u could argue that since it will play all (w very few exceptions) all the switch games that its a new iteration of the switch. Since the new games would command too much power for the og then id be inclined to call it a new system. In my perfect world, nintendo is already working w 3rd parties to make late ps4 & early ps5 games capable of running on switch 1 or 2 years after the ps series s releases. Hopefully we can get some same day releases and I can finally stop buying 2 consoles a generation. Thats the dream at least. Side note for perspective- I dont care about portability, I just want to play big AAA titles on the same system im playing zelda and metroid prime.

I guess it depends on how the tech and the market evolve over time. Nintendo has a lot of reasons to ride out the Switch longer than their usual 4-5 year life cycles. But with the Switch being in between the end of the current-gen consoles and the beginning of the next-gen consoles, future third party support can be tricky as we don't know how many third party developers will continue to support the Switch, even if it reaches 100 million units. The Switch will be even less powerful compared to Xbox Series X and PS5, but distinguished enough (in price, features, purpose, library, etc.) that it still has a place in the market (which shows in the current environment, even when FFVII Remake, DOOM Eternal, P5R, and other high-end console games have recently released).

The Switch 2 (or whatever it will be) will be an interesting piece of tech. While the tech is there, it would have to be timed appropriately. Nintendo would want to avoid selling consoles at a loss (which partly why they released the OG Switch at $300). Would a Switch 2 be reasonable at $350? $300? I remember some people online were taken aback when they learned that the Switch was going to launch at $300, especially when the PS4 was being sold around that price (or less) at the time and had a more established library and greater market- and mindshare. Would the Switch 2 be powerful enough to get ports from next-gen games? And how would that affect Nintendo's output?

The Game Boy-Game Boy Color wasn't really a planned thing by Nintendo, when people cite that they need to know what they're talking about. Game Boy sales had collapsed by 1995-96 (from a peak of about 16 mill/year down to about 5 mill/year).

Nintendo was working on a 32-bit Game Boy successor codenamed Atlantis at the time. It was supposed to actually be far more powerful than the GBA, it was even supposed to display 3D graphics, I'd guess probably like maybe a Sega 32X range system.

The system had development problems and never came out. So they rushed Virtual Boy to the market because Yamauchi wanted at least something to help make up for declined Game Boy sales. That flopped.

Then something completely unprecedented happened, Pokemon, which no one expected to be a hit, took off in Japan and Game Boy sales started to rise again there. To capitalize on this Nintendo slapped together a Game Boy Color model as Pokemon took off worldwide. GBC could run exclusive, specific games and was kind of like its own platform.

The rest of Nintendo's system transitions have been fairly straight forward, 5-6 year primary product cycle, a couple of revisions maybe.

What I could see is a more phased transition with more cross-platform games. For example if Switch 2 comes out in 2023 and there's a 2D Mario game, there's no real reason it couldn't run on Switch 1 and Switch 2, and just run on Switch 2 at 1080p portable/4K docked. There's lots of Nintendo franchises quite frankly that could be like that.