Games

I don't think Nintendo have ever done a Console 2 before though. I was hoping for Super Switch but as ever Nintendo absolutely refuse to be predictable!

Hall effect sensor expert here! No, the magnets in the joycons that are used to attach to the display/body of the Switch 2 would not interfere with hall effect analog sticks.

Two reasons:

• The magnets are too far away (sensors are usually only sensitive to magnets within 10-12mm directly above/below)
• The mounting/attachment magnets would be perpendicular to the magnets in the analog sticks (if you imagine the flux lines they wouldn't cross the sensory boundary).

Regardless, it would be trivial to place a tiny little piece of ferromagnetic blocking tape wherever necessary to prevent interference.

Yeah with Nintendo watching two Xboxes languish and consumer discontent with the recent playstations as well, there's not a real impetus for something radical in design. Some innovation would be exciting but the Switch and PC Handhelds prove people want big grippy mobile devices, even if they're only moving between rooms.

They actively become easier and shorter every generation. Arceus brought a lot of cool stuff into the series and there was a little bit of hope that things would improve only for them to go back to the stale old formula that wouldn’t be as bad if the games weren’t so easy now that you could beat them by mashing A. I know it’s for kids but damn, the old games were somewhat challenging.

It is literally the biggest money maker in the world. The games sell about 3/5 as many copies as COD with a tiny fraction of the budget. And then they sell even more in merch. And there are people (like me in the past) that buy Nintendo consoles just for those games.

Especially considering it has access to DLSS, I‘m looking forward to see what Nintendo‘s first party studios can cook up with these specs. But I‘m waiting for the OLED model sometime in the future.

GPU that's roughly on par with the Steam Deck.

...when comparing TFLOPs, and that's not comparable across architectures (by different companies as well!).

If we take similar-performing (in rasterization) Ampere and RDNA 2 cards (say a 3080 and 6800 XT), we can see the 3080 has 29.77 TFLOPs and the 6800 XT has 20.74 TFLOPs, an RDNA 2 FLOP is worth about 1.4x as much as an Ampere FLOP.

So extrapolating the 1.6 "RDNA 2 TFLOPs" of the Deck we get 2.24 "Ampere TFLOPs" and that'd make the Deck quite a bit faster than the Switch 2 in portable mode, but slower than the Switch 2 in docked mode.

This is obviously all just wild and silly speculation, but I doubt the Switch 2 will match the Deck in portable mode. Samsung 8nm would just eat too much power for this to realistically happen in a handheld form factor.