It's funny in retrospect to look back at that time Nintendo announced to it's shareholders that they wanted the system to last at 10 years when they realized it's success.

It's still the active system for Nintendo during it's 8th year and will not be replaced before it begins it's 9th cycle. They sure weren't kidding

I don't recall Nintendo ever mentioning a specific timespan like "at least ten years." What they did say time and time again is that Switch won't be bound to Nintendo's conventional console lifecycle. (Which would have meant six years until replacement.)

If you’re looking to be technical, the NSW is currently in its 9th *fiscal* year (March 2017 was apart of F’17). So there won’t be a replacement until it reaches its 10th fiscal year. It’s a bit of a stretch, but you *can* say this.

Good point

You’re right. I’m not sure they ever said 10 years. The Nintendo president did say they expect to support switch longer than the typical 5-6 year lifespan. So that timespan was mentioned. No numbers after that. The media ran with it and that’s where the 10 year number came from. 

that being said if you are specifically calling out support longer than 5/6 years you’re not making a point of calling that out to imply 7 years. So 8-10 seems a reasonable inference. 

source:  https://nintendosoup.com/nintendo-wants-extend-switchs-lifespan-6-years/

You're right. I was mislead by an article I read on the question. It was about Furukawa wanting to go beyond the conventional 5-6 years span they were going with consoles at the time. Therefore, people speculated about 7-10 years for the system.

I remember in 2022 when President Furuwaka stated “Switch is just in the middle of its lifecycle and the momentum going into this year is good. The Switch is ready to break a pattern of our past consoles that saw momentum weakening in their sixth year on the market and grow further”.

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/02/nintendo-president-reiterates-that-switch-is-just-in-the-middle-of-its-lifecycle

Given this, it was stated about 5 years after the Switch’s release, meaning that if it’s halfway at 5 years then the full lifecycle can be considered 10 years.

Switch will continue to sell in 2027. And it should surpass the total PS2 sold estimates by early 2026.

For me, the closest to a perfect version would be a Switch Lite with dock support. They don't even need to include a dock in the box, but bringing back the small component that allows a Switch to connect to a TV, which Nintendo decided to remove from the beginning, would be great. Having a compact console without Joy-Cons would be awesome.

"The middle" has always refered to an undefined timespan of at least a few years in this context, not the exact midpoint. When Furukawa first used this term in 2020 (quote: "entered the middle of its lifecycle") quite a few people mistakingly interpreted this as Switch will be replaced after six years.

This did lead us to some nice heated debates for the speculative ol'days of the Switch successor... Can you still imagine people genuinely thought 2022 was possible while there were still saying the current model was only at the end of it's "mid-life" ? 

It was also from that point on they kept their cards closer to their chest for upcoming 2nd half of the year releases which led to further speculation since there was apparently nothing slated during those periods. Yet each time coming in assuaging every doubts people had for the longevity of the system software offering.