There's already charts posted in this thread that show the DSi and New 3DS basically had a short boost effect on both of those products and then sales declined after that short period. You can't really argue with the data. 

The Switch was already a higher end product from day 1, whereas the 3DS and DS were really not, the main Switch actually has already had a Mariko revision as well which significantly boosts the battery life as well.

You can increase the size of the screen, but I question how much utility you get out of that. A small 3 inch screen going to 4.5 inches is a notable difference, but going from like 6.2 inches to say 7.2 inches is not going to be as notable of a feature. 6.2 inches is already a fairly large screen.  

I think I'm the only who suggested a holiday 2021 launch, mainly for BOTW2/Metroid, and starving off interest which would otherwise go to PS5/SX (not essential as Nintendo can coexist  but good to increase third party support which is one reason why Nintendo systems have short lives imo). Could be a tad early but I'd just say again, if the audience isn't ready for a successor in 2021 then they aren't ready for a Switch Pro either (unless it's a cheap switch tv)

Throw a meek upgrade late into the gen for what? Market it as the new shiny thing at full $299 (or more). It slows down the decline but things still decline and it doesn't secure another 5 years of software purchases or investment in the platform/brand (both from consumers but also from developers).

Meanwhile you've just got 15m people who were obviously interested in a new shiny device to rebuy a platform they'll stop using in 2 years, instead of investing them in your future eco system. Nice in the short term, risky longterm. When you actually release your successor 1/2 years later, they're not inclined to upgrade.

The Pro upgrades make sense for PS4 because it will have an 8 year life span and a decent gap between Pro and PS5 (4years). Can the Switch do that?

We've seen several times in the past that Nintendo has had a massive peak (imo 2020 is it) and 3 years later no one cares about their offerings. Both on the old platform and whatever new platform they're about to release. Maybe it's sinply about software and having the right titles but I think maintaining momentum in hardware is also a factor. If I'm not mistaken the most successful console transitions (PS1> PS2 & PS3>PS4) were all replaced the year after their sales peaked. Although things would be different as there is no need to "replace" the system.

Hopefully I'm wrong and Switch can show legs and we see software releases which continues to compete with its current mega sellers. Which is another thing we dont see from Nintendo, maybe Switch can break that curse. When all is said and done, many PS4 best sellers will be from the year it's about to be "replaced" FFVII, TLOU2, Cyberpunk, Modern warfare.  You look at Nintendo platforms and you never see such a healthy spread across a systems life.

They can't really do a 2021 model that would be a major upgrade unless they've been planning it for years in advance and that looks doubtful. The hacker code that's found at the various different model iterations like Mariko doesn't point to anything like that.

It's already May 2020, you can't just make hardware that quickly.

You may get a model with a larger screen and some other ancillary features that largely go unused in 2021 or 2022 but that's about it.

I still think it's a mistake to use past Nintendo systems as a forecast for the Switch, as it's unlike any of them. No past Nintendo system has made it passed 3 years at launch price. No past Nintendo system has had both a presence in the home console market and a monopoly in the handheld space. It's not bound by the limitations of its predecessors.

I mean the $199.99 Switch Lite is basically the option for people who can't afford to pay $300 to get into the Switch ecosystem. There's no reason to cut the price of the main model when that exists and can serve the budget portion of the market. It basically functions as a price drop. 

Apple does the same thing, they don't drop the price of the main iPhone XS, but they do introduce lower end models with features cut out at a lower price like the XR model. 

Price cuts really are becoming more and more rare in gaming anyway, I think all the big 3 are becoming more and more reluctant to do them. Possibly they have internal testing that shows the people who won't buy a system until its dirt cheap are also cheap when it comes to buying software, so the juice isn't worth the squeeze. PS4 is going on 7 years old and Sony still won't cut past $299.99 as the normal price. 

There is incredibly hard evidence that it would be a mistake to replace the Switch before late 2023. We just have to look at the product lifecycle of the console! If someone doesn’t know about the product life-cycle theory, here is a Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_life-cycle_theory . 

There are five phases in the lifecycle of a product: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Saturation and Decline. Introduction is self-explanatory. The Growth phase means that revenues with the product keep increasing and keep increasing at the same or faster rate. This is exactly the phase the Switch is in right now, as its sales have been growing rapidly in 2020. In the Maturity phase, the sales increases become slower and then (Saturation) stagnate and start do decline. 

With the Switch, Nintendo realised the growth phase (in 2018) wasn’t as strong as they had hoped for and that the Switch was mainly selling to male customers aged 20-30. To alleviate this, they introduced the Switch Lite and software like Brain Training, Animal Crossing, Ring Fit. The Switch Lite was meant to attract a larger audience and to spur the growth phase of the product. Same thing happened with the DS Lite and 3DS XL / 2DS. This (mainly the software) was successful: Enter 2020 and the Switch is still in the growth-phase of the product lifecycle. Just to make clear why this is profoundly important, let’s compare the product life cycle of the Switch to that of the Wii:

Every stage of the product lifecycle lasted roughly one year for the Wii. Now, let’s look at the Switch.

As we can see, the growth phase of the Switch is probably going to last three full years! Thrice as long as the growth phase of the Wii! We can thus expect the Switch to last at least two years longer compared to the Wii, probably three years, unless we prescribe to the infamous „sales falling off a cliff“ theory and believe after three years of growth there will just be one year of Saturation before the Switch declines heavily (this could be possible, but only if Nintendo prematurely abandons the platform).

So, what is the point of a redesign (the technical term is "re-launch" by the way) in the Maturity stage of the product lifecycle? Is it to increase sales? No! The point is to prolong the Maturity phase. This is well understood and documented. This is what companies do all the time and it’s the reason why Nintendo released the DSi and the New 3DS. A „New Switch“ in late 2020 or in 2021 thus makes perfect sense and it’s a tactic Nintendo has often implemented in the past. Basically every single manufacturer in this business releases redesigns of their consoles during the Maturity phase of the product lifecycle. Why would everyone, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, do this if these redesigns didn’t have the desired effect? And just to drive the point home: In many graphs depicting the product lifecycle, re-launches (here: redesigns) are actually baked into the graph. It is widely expected that companies will try to prolong the Maturity phase, as this is where the big profits are! If Nintendo cuts short the Maturity phase, they are going to lose a hell of a lot of profits.

As for when the Switch 2 should launch: The best point to release the successor of a product is at the end of the Saturation phase, or once the product is in actual decline. For the Switch that could be 2023. It could be 2024, but I’m always sceptical about Nintendo as they turn somewhat crazy whenever they got some success. So if you want to argue that the Switch 2 should release in 2022, you have to argue against a very popular business theory.

Next gen consoles have been confirmed to support hardware Ray Tracing... How effective and extensive that support is... Remains to be seen as AMD has not introduced that technology or even demonstrated it's capabilities in the PC space yet... And thus we are unable to dissect the technology.

Basically we need to wait and see.

As for GPU's and A.I... You don't actually need dedicated FP16/FP32/INT Matrix cores to do the calculations like nVidia has done, you can do it on the regular GPU pipelines, it will just be less efficient as you will be relying on rapid packed math... Whether AMD will have Tensor-like GPU cores remains to be seen, but AMD's GPU's have typically held the edge in pure computational throughput over nVidia so they may not see the need... But games typically need more than just compute, hence why nVidia is faster in games.

Again that will require a wait and see approach... But frame reconstruction to "fake" higher resolutions is a front-and-center focus for -all- platforms going forth, the Xbox One X and Playstation 4 Pro made it a primary issue, we are just in that "trial" phase to see what the best technological approach is, just like with Anti-Aliasing a few years ago after moving from the 7th gens morphological implementations.

If you want the best GPU technology... nVidia is simply where it is at, they are ahead of AMD in every regard... Heck, nVidia still outperforms AMD even with it's GPU's built at 12nm verses AMD's 7nm.

In saying that, if you want the best performance at a cost-sensitive price point, AMD cannot be beaten, which is why it's the only choice for high performance consoles... Especially if you want the integration of high performance CPU cores.

For mobile form factors, nVidia Tegra is definitely the best choice, Nintendo's only other real improvement on that front when the Switch launched would have been to double the Ram and include the Tegra X2 which would have provided 50% more performance at the same power consumption, but I assume nVidia put forth a pretty lucrative deal... And it's paid off for Nintendo either way.

Just a few points;

1. 2010 was around 5m decline for the Wii if I saw correctly. IMO Nintendo should have released the Wii's successor end of 2011. 

2. A rigid product life cycle theory is based on the idea that a successor immediately replaces the existing platform as opposed to them co-existing in tandem, mostly sharing a library ($199 Switch- $399 Switch 2). I just want to stress that Nintendo has to think about the next 5 years, the industry is evolving, the Switch itself is a reflection of that,  just keep that in mind.

3. We don't know when Switch will peak and decline but we do know all of the biggest software we can foresee has now hit the platform (please remind me if there's a title im missing). Its ultimately an unknown, may they try another labo/Ring Fit type game and it explodes but we cannot ignore that the Wii's peak came with it mega software like Wii Sports Resort (also a new peripheral), Wii Fit (Also a new peripheral), New Super Mario Bros Wii.

4. Hypothetically If 2020 is the peak when then should we expect to see a Switch 2? 

5. I'm not at all against a redesign of a Switch, I'm against a Switch Pro. In fact I heavily champion a cheap Switch TV. 

The Switch is unique, but given the time we're in, I also think its a mistake to the use past generation concepts to outline the future.

1. In hindsight this is probably what Nintendo should have done with how things turned out in the end. However, looking at it from a 2009-2011 standpoint, it would have been better for Nintendo to release more quality titles for the platform. The Wii's decline (software-wise) began in late 2008 when both Animal Crossing: City Folk and Wii Music, Nintendo's two big holiday games, underperformed. Animal Crossing is more suited to handheld play and Wii Music was the first sign of Nintendo not understanding its own strategy. The Wii was a disruptive product, a "crappy product for crappy customers". With Wii Music Nintendo showed that they didn't actually understand their new customer base. They merely thought of them as "the casualz" and like the rest of the industry thought these customers would basically buy anything as long as it was easy to pick up and play. The success of New Super Mario Bros and Wii Sports Resort in late 2009 show that the Wii had the potential to have a longer Maturity phase, but after that Nintendo didn't release much system selling software anymore.

2. The product lifecycle theory actually accounts for this. Basically, Switch 2 could be released at the end of the Switches Saturation phase, but according to the theory the original Switch can still sell for another year or two, even if its sales are declining. I agree that Nintendo has to think of the next 5 years, but that's exactly what this theory is used for in practise: to determine when to make the transition to the successor product while maximizing profits.

3. I can think of Super Mario Bros. Switch, Switch Sports and (believe it or not) Nintendogs. Nintendogs on 3DS didn't "bomb" (it didn't actually bomb: It sold 4.6 million units according to VGChartz) because people had moved on from the series but because it was a mass market game released as a launch title for a console that was aimed at hardcore gamers (3D and better graphics were Nintendo's selling points for the 3DS at launch). 

4. Well, that's hard to answer. It depends on how Nintendo handles the Switch software-wise. Personally, I don't expect them to release software like the big games mentioned in point 3, because Nintendo's developers are stubborn and want to develop whatever fits their boat. In that case, late 2023 would probably be the best time to release the Switch 2. I don't expect them to play their cards right after what happened between 2009 and 2016, but people like RolStoppable have a more positive outlook - in which case the ideal time would probably be late 2024, as Nintendo could push the Switch's growth Phase into 2021. Of course, if Nintendo botches every single big software release, the Switch might actually crash and burn (relative to its success), making a late 2022 release somewhat possible. But that really is the absolute worst case scenario and I don't see that happening personally, unless Nintendo truly goes nuts. And with Furukawa as CEO that's unlikely. 

5. I think it's possible that Nintendo will release such a product. However, that would ideally be released at a later point in the product lifecycle, during the Saturation phase of the product. Think of the Wii Mini, the cheap variants of the NES and SNES, the New 2DS XL which was cheaper than the New 3DS or the cheap version of the PSP (PSP e-1000 was its name, I think) or the PS3 super-slim. The product lifecycle theory actually accounts for such cheaper revisions during that Phase. A "New Switch" would be more fitting to prolong the Maturity phase of the product, as Nintendo has done that multiple times in the past and they have experience with it.

And as a general note: This is Nintendo we're talking about. They're the company that followed up the Wii with the Wii U and honestly thought people would transition from the most easy to learn controller to the console with the most complicated und bulky controller of all times. They're also the company that didn't learn from the Virtual Boy and made stereoscopic 3D the main feature of the 3DS. With Nintendo, many things happen that don't make much sense. So I'm not saying a Switch 2 in late 2022 is impossible, just that it doesn't seem like a good idea.