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So, according to Digital Foundry Nintendo originally considered a "Mid gen Upgrade" for Nintendo Switch, what a lot of people were calling the "Switch Pro". However, they discarded that idea in favor of working on the actual Switch successor.

Now, I don't know how reliable is that source, but if it's true, then I bet we will hear something bigger by the first couple of months in 2023.

Speculate/Hypothetically? Nintendo got so tired of leakers they killed Switch Pro, in favor of Switch 2? Every youtuber making Switch Pro clicks and hyping up others really made Nintendo salty? Remember this is unpredictable Nintendo. Noone ever thought Nintendo would kill Smash bros tournaments and Splatoon Tournaments nor Nintendo takes down fan projects or Copyright Music or takedown Steam wall papers seriously weird one there too.

At this point if a Switch Pro does exist it may as well be a next gen Switch. I don’t really see that happening. If it does, and many speculate about this, then I think the “Switch Family” like the iPhone is here to stay for a very long time.

Personally I think there’s just too much hubbub everywhere for people clamoring for a new device. The zeitgeist says get us to the future, please. I don’t think that means 2023, but 2024 or 2025 at the very latest.

Pretty sure some dev kits were out there a couple of years ago. I have no doubt Nintendo was going to do a refresh. It's what they do in handhelds. Pandemic likely killed it. I'm ready for a whole new switch.

They are always working on new hardware, it wouldn't surprise me if this was true. It's probably too late at this point to come out with the Switch pro.

Honestly, Switch did not and does not need a Pro model.

Better to just make it a full generational successor at this point.

I'm not really sure if I buy it, I think this is more of some devs maybe being in the dark/half-dark and putting things together where they don't exist or confusing the successor hardware with a mid-gen refresh. 

Nvidia wasn't going to just randomly make a custom GPU for Nintendo for free, and if Nintendo paid for a redesign, I'd say there's little to no chance they wouldn't use it, they're way too cheap to spend a good chunk of money on a chip and not use it. This isn't the 90s anymore, chip designs cost a lot of money these days. 

If you look at the Tegra X1 and Tegra X2, aside from the die shrink (Mariko) it's not like Nvidia offers those SoCs with like extra CUDA cores + extra ARM CPU cores ... it doesn't work like that, not just for Nintendo but for basically any vendor that uses the Tegra chips. 

I mean we already discussed it (with some people arguing rumours were trash and should never be listened to), every leak/rumour back in late 2020 early 2021 pointed to a significant upgraded model by the end of 2021, and we got the OLED, which is superior to the original Switch (post 2019) in every aspect, except for the SoC. So I guess they reached a breaking point where they were like "okay nevermind, scrap it" and they released the OLED without the power upgrade.

And then it was already too late to release a new model. I mean at +120 million units sold, you don't wanna divide your install base.

I actually thought that this happened. The reason I thought so was twofold: a) The chip crunch and b) NVidia going on saying that they won't develop custom chips for anyone. To go into detail:

When Nvidia said that they won't develop a custom for any clients, there wasn't really any good upgrade possibilities within the Tegra line of chips at the time. The X2 would only have been a minor update, most of which Nintendo got already with the die-shrink of the X1, and Xavier was engineered for AI, with a server/workstation GPU architecture that doesn't fit well into a gaming device and as a result, also here the performance increase would have been minor.

The chip crunch also certainly had a hand in the situation, as getting a new chip on a smaller process would have meant getting pushed back in the line and competing against other manufacturers for production volume when the outdated process of the X1 resulted in fairly limited competition for the process, and as a result, a low volume of chips being produced. Due to this, Nintendo would have been forced to continue producing the "old" Switch for the foreseeable future as their volume model, and as such, the "pro" model simply didn't make any business sense at the time.

Would I have been an exec at Nintendo at the time, I would certainly have done the same. The time just wasn't right for a pro model with everything stacked against it, so putting more time into developing a successor sounds like the right thing to do to me, too.

I also think that the development of a pro model was already fairly advanced when they had to change course. Short of a chip for a new pro model, they just implemented the other new features they wanted to bring along with the better hardware on it's own without the performance upgrade to completely write off the R&D costs that went into it: Enter the Switch OLED.

This makes sense to me. Especially since I think Switch 2 will depend on a lot of cross gen 1st party support in its first year or so.

A Switch Pro would make Switches 2 launch harder to get excited about, particularly for their core audience who just spent $399 on a Pro upgrade