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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

Neither the Wii, Wii U or Switch have anything powerful from a hardware perspective - the last time Nintendo released a product equally powered to the competition was the Game Cube but that was over 22 years ago now.

This is the 'withered technologies' playbook in action - use underpowered/mature technology in new and fun ways rather than relying on cutting-edge graphics technologies. As an example when the switch was launched in 2017 the CPU on the SoC was from 2012.

Nothing in the Wii was cutting edge in terms of the technology - it was just well implemented. The motion controls were 2 IR dots and a cheap camera, and that wasn't a new concept.

Similarly nothing in the switch was actually cutting edge technologically, just assembled into a great product.

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I think the point was you are looking at technology purely through the lens of processor speed. But technology incorporates a lot of elements of the design, not just raw speed.

While processor speed may have withered, there were other innovative and cutting edge aspects of the design.

What was cutting edge about the Switch?

It was innovative and a great product, but I'm not sure anything in it was cutting-edge from a technology perspective.

Something doesn't have to be cutting-edge though to be innovative, fun, well designed and a great product.

This is the the best take. When the switch was new, this was a refreshing take—and using "older" technology means proven SDKs and lower costs for volume.

It's just sad that the switch has become long in the tooth. Great for many, but now limiting. The problem is that Nintendo has tried and failed to succeed with spec bump consoles (see, the new Nintendo DS and the new Nintendo 3DS), so the fact that they haven't followed up the Switch with a spec bump makes gobs of sense.

My first Nintendo device since the original NES was in 2015 when I bought a 'New' Nintendo 3DS XL. It was getting long in the tooth by then, but I had a lot of fun with it and still mess with it from time to time (the eShop closing made me grab a bunch of stuff before it was shut down). Just a few weeks ago I bought an OLED switch. Figured I would see if Breath of the Wild was all it was cracked up to be. I'm having a ton of fun, even if the console is getting up there. If I want bleeding edge graphics I have my PC for that.

What is sad about having a 6 year old console that just had a title sell 10 million copies in 3 days?

The classic example of this from Nintendo's toymaker days is a remote controlled toy car that only turns left. It was cheaper for them to make it that way and you can still race cars around a track.

Tegra line started then but the Tegra x1 was a 2015 chip

It was launched in 2017 with a SoC from 2015, and the SoC contained a CPU that launched in 2012.

Contrast this with the PS5, which launched in 2020 with an AMD Zen 2 CPU which launched in 2019.

And the original DS launched with a pitiful 67 mhz ARM9 CPU and 2mb of RAM. It sold 150 million consoles. Because the games were good.

If you care about tech specs, consoles are a losing battle. Even if they are a good price-performance when they release, the length of console cycles will inevitably cause them to be underpowered and outdated by the second half of their existence, and yet many great and generation defining games come out closer to the end of a console's life cycle.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the X1 CPU seems remarkably different from the 2012 Tegras like we saw in the Nexus 7 tablet. Here's a comparison I found https://gadgetversus.com/processor/nvidia-tegra-3-t30l-vs-nv...

In what sense did the X1 cpu launch in 2012?

Despite what that site says, the Tegra X1 isn't a CPU or Processor - it is a SoC.

i.e. The X1 is a chip which contains lots of stuff including some processors from 2012.

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