Yeah, and honestly, the pro versions worked for them before. 

While the Series S is alright, it starting weaker right outta the gate isn't going to help it later on down the line. It makes much more sense to just start out the gate with something decent, then releasing a slightly better one a year or 3 later, when the parts are cheaper and slightly better chips are available. 

It's more or less the same sort of philosophy I roll with when it comes to building a PC, like why start out with a very minimal weaker build, when I could go for a mid-range to high build and simply add slightly better parts later on. Starting out with weaker parts just means I'd have to replace them more sooner and often, which means more money spent over time. 

This is also why I wish Nintendo just followed Sony in terms of making a bolstered console for a new gen release, then making a slightly better one later (instead of now, where they purposefully chose 1st gen Nvidia mobile chips to save on money and not sell at a loss, and I can already see the Switch's graphical/perf limitations in their 1st party games). 

Whenever I make a PC that is my mindset, pick up the middle ground where I can have the best performance per cost to hold 5 years at decent level, and if I have a surplus of money perhaps upgrade midway, but to get the very best and hold over 5 years without upgrade would be to costly and without that big of an impact (cost benefit for me).

Even since the Game Boy, with the GB, GB Light (with light), GB Pocket and GB Color (more powerful)

Not to forget the revisions of Master System and Mega Drive and of course the add-ons.

I hoped Nintendo would have released a standalone console version that always runs at max speed. Better cooling, run at higher clock speed like the docked Switch does already but push it to the max in a better cooled Wii size box. Still the benefit of lower cost, yet offering a choice for native 1080p on TV.

I have no interest in handheld play so the screen part is completely useless to me and the dock rather awkward under the tv. I'm basically paying more for less performance than if there was a console option. BoTW still looked great in 900p on my 1080p projector, but it was always visibly not as sharp as many ps3 and 360 games. Plus I had to put the dock halfway between me and the screen or the left joy-con would randomly disconnect :/ Anyway Nintendo left money on the table, I would have bought a standalone version and more games for Switch.

Same here. I do think the hybrid idea was great for Nintendo, but the core of that was unified architecture and development. A more powerful fully table console to make the games look and play better would be a plus imho.

This is why I feel like I got lucky with my 080ti, since that is still doing me good since I got it back in 2017. My CPU and Ram are def holding me back atm though.

I wouldn't have minded that tbh, even though I used my switch in portable mode since getting it in 2018. My main issues were it's stick drift, battery life and perf in both mobile and docked mode, like it's docked mode hardly felt like a world of difference.

For the life of me, I just don't see Ninty going back to their GC days, because since the GC, they've been going for cheaper to produce systems, that don't break the bank for too long.

I'm interested in what Valve can do with the Deck in docked mode though, but I'm probably going to wait for it's 2nd iteration to see where it's desktop mode goes from there.

That being said, I do wish Ninty would splurge a lil on their next system, because this gen for them so far has been nothing but one big success and a shit ton of cashflow. They can absolutely afford to splurge a bit on their next system and take a loss for a couple years, while giving us a better experience and a longer lasting system that doesn't have to rely on shortcuts over time.

Sony isn't gonna copy a cheap console that requires promotions/sales to sell 30% or less than their supply constrained (COVID) premium console. I stilll think Series S is a misfired product that benefited from the pandemic by sheer luck.

If it does happen, I hope it wouldn't be as big of a gap as Series S vs X, but we will inevitably get to a point where the lowest common denominator for the majority of relevant video games will be your mobile phone, so the appeal of a powerful hardware will decrease over time. It's just a matter of when.

The Series S will be fine, I have the Series S, X and Playstation 5, it's a 1080P/1440P console... And I align my expectations to match that.

It is more capable than people realise.

Also doesn't help that AMD's ray tracing capabilities tends to be terrible... Which sadly the Xbox Series S/X and Playstation 5 ended up being lumped with.
Even the new Radeon 7000 series leaves a lot to be desired on the Ray Tracing front, it's better... No doubt, but far from where it should be.

I don't expect the Xbox Series X One X/Playstation 5 Pro consoles to get 60fps Ray Tracing, they just won't have the technology available to them at an affordable price point just yet.

NAND is a volatile market, the opposite can infact occur, where prices can rise substantially.
It's unlikely to happen to due to densities of stacked DRAM increasing at the same price, but walls will be hit eventually.

From a consumer point, you won't notice a difference in SSD speed from 3GB/s to 30GB/s verses the jump from a mechanical hard drive to even a 0.5GB/s SSD... The biggest benefit for us was actually access latencies and seek times, we went from 10-100ms down to 1-2ms, everything became responsive.

Volume.
They can leverage a separate production line for a different SKU and pump more hardware into the marketplace... It seems Sony and Microsoft and to a lesser extent, Nintendo, just can't have enough units in the marketplace.

I have a Ryzen 9 5950X - 16 Cores/32 Threads @5ghz... And I often feel I am CPU limited. And I probably am, especially in single threaded CPU demanding titles like Sins of a Solar Empire or Crysis.

But it's still got years of life left in it. - But once the Ryzen 7000 series finished tumbling in price, it will be upgrade time.

Conversely... I have kept the old Core 2 Quad Q6600 around for this very reason to see how "low can she go" to keep playing the latest games... Even sitting at 3.6Ghz, it can maintain 30fps in many of the latest titles... Some are just unplayable these days, but it's interesting to see the variance in CPU load in the latest games.... Some titles will suck on every single thread my Ryzen has, others are happy with just low-end 1-2 cores, provided the rest of the system is up to snuff.

A pro version for the xbox serires/ps5 just doesn't seem to be in the cards. This console generation microsoft or sony didn't skimp out on the hardware. At the time of release they shipped the "4k" twins with a 3rd gen ryzen cpu which is similar to a ryzen 7 4700g minus the integrated graphics and an RDNA 2 based gpu that lands around the rx 6700 10 gb desktop gpu in performance. 

We also have to think of the constraint place on the consoles...the ps5 and series x are both very hot consoles so we saw the sizes increase in other areas to make up for the heat that's generated from the components in use. I personally just don't think it's in the cards for Sony or Microsoft to release a pro version that is only 10 to 15% more powerful than then the current gen consoles. They're already both working on razor thin margins when it comes to wattage and heat dissipation. It isn't as easy to say they can upgrade the gpu to one that is similar to the 6800xt or 6900xt...or it's not possible to jump to RDNA 3 as RDNA 3 at its core is a completely different architecture in comparison to RDNA 2. I personally think we will see the ps5 slim and series x slim as the console revisions as there isn't enough of a performance jump to justify a pro variant.