[jayd16]

I don't really see how the Switch is a good case of this lateral thinking, nor withered technology. They just got nVidia to make them a powerful gaming tablet, something nVidia was push hard to sell at the time. In this way they were able to continue to dominate the mobile market and hedge their console strategy.

[Jonnax]

The SoC (Tegra X1) was released in 2013.

The Switch came out in 2017.

So it's not really that new.

Also Nvidia has failed to sell it to the tablet/mobile market.

[jayd16]

They sold to Nintendo so I see it as a major success. Any way I look at it, Nintendo is using the switch hardware as originally intended. I guess you could say any use of older tech counts but I don't think that's as much in the spirit of the article as, say, the Wii's use of RF for motion tracking.

[danbolt]

I think it’s more that the commodity smartphone technologies were used “laterally” to make a game console that can be played portability. Or, smartphones have been iterating on graphics chipsets since the 3DS was released, so it seems sensible to capitalize on them in a way that a smartphone wasn’t going to.

I think it worked really well for Nintendo too, as they’re very much still a toy company compared to Sony or Microsoft. The budgets for handheld games were likely going to be bigger compared to the DS and 3DS for the next decade, so it makes sense to start to look at them as the same as console game development.