Its important to note that patent designs rarely have the final design in them. Most of the time they draw only a very generic, very basic design with the proper technical features. It may look like this and have Switch BC, but it might be completely different.
Also, as I have been saying all along, Nintendo definitely delayed Metroid Prime 4 (a game announced extremely early into the Switch's lifecycle) to be a Switch successor launch title.
I can only hope their new console gets an emulator relatively quickly, because Nintendo keeps making hardware that is severely outdated and underpowered before it even comes out.
Oh yeah, a patent isn't definitive proof of anything. The housing could potentially be different, but the pin out would be pretty well defined here. I'm inferring a lot on this one
No idea. But going by the trend of Nintendo, the Wii, WiiU, and Switch were all released so underpowered that they were basically releasing a console that could only compete with the previous generation.
These days Nintendo doesn't really try to compete on performance. The Wii, for instance, was unapologetically what it was. You played relatively low-poly, low-res, low-texture games on it, but you played them, because they were fun and imaginative.
That's their main thing. Performance comes, like, 4th.
However, this time, they got burned on their own games. Zelda Tears of the Kingdom had pretty obvious performance issues that even the normiest of normies could notice, for instance. And my memory is short but I think that wasn't the only first-party game where performance was a challenge.
I think this time they'll care about performance more than last time. It's not like they've never done it. The really old consoles from the 20th century were competitive on performance, right?
Nintendo wasn't always like that though. They only became that way because the Wii printed money, and they have been chasing that success by just trying to repeat it.
Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity in multiplayer had an atrocious framerate.