I have posted many times what I expect out of this thing. And it's in many ways exciting, disappointing in some others.
Why can't I also comment on the general atmosphere in here, which is in my opinion a gross overestimation of the capabilites of the device? Is it only 'contributing to the discussion' if I agree with it being a powerhouse?
I know you prefer an echo chamber, you made that clear in countless NX threads even before the reveal, but this is still a discussion board. You don't get to decide what does and what doesn't contribute to the discussion simply because you have other thoughts on the matter.
And I wasn't bashing anyone, I was merely reminding everyone that at the same place in time before the Wii-U launch, a lot of people had very similar postings of the device's power with plenty of sourcing and insiders.
None of it panned out. I'm merely drawing some parallels here. Maybe this time will be totally different, but i'm thinking it won't. Feel free to disagree.
I agree that just trouncing about the idea that the Switch is going to be a power house doesn't add to the discussion without proper evidence. However, trying to "keep it real because of what happened in the WUST threads" is quite erroneous as well. The situation surrounding the Switch and the Wii U are very different, for a few reasons.
1. The Wii U chip was an unknown entity at the time. There was not very much known about it, aside from a few hints like "using technology found in IBM's POWER-series of CPUs" and "being powered by a custom Radeon GPU." Not very much information could legitimately be deduced from there, and everyone had to go off of approximate real-world performance compared to the Xbox 360. This is further complicated by the change in dev-kit hardware, where very early on, they were closer to an Xbox 360 than what actually came of it. And because of this, we had users such as bgassassin concluding from the smallest shreds of evidence that we had the hardware was going to be more powerful than what it was. Some users ran with it, some didn't.
2. The Switch has baseline. This is due to knowledge leaked by proven sources. We know that the dev-kits are running Tegra X1s, and that a custom (possibly Pascal-based) Tegra is going to power the final retail unit. We also know that there are products on the market that use the Tegra X1, most notably the Google Pixel C tablet. It's not that dangerous to deduce that we can expect at a minimum the performance of the Switch SoC being similar to that of the Pixel C when in portable mode. Where it does get a little complicated is trying to figure out the power of the system when docked. We know from sources that have proven themselves to be reliable that the system does produce more power when docked. However, we don't know much more.
3. We don't know how much involvement Nintendo has had in the development of the Switch SoC. It's readily apparent that they had significant involvement in the Wii U MCM, as they wanted to minimize power draw whilst trying to maintain a balanced power envelope and keeping Wii backwards compatibility. The Switch is a different story, as it's a derivation of an architecture they didn't help devise themselves. It's also by a company that they have not produced a retail product with before, so we can't deduce the working relationship between Nintendo and Nvidia. Another thing we know is that since the Wii U architecture was devised, Nintendo's hardware division has been significantly restructured. How that's affected the development pipeline, we don't know. But we can't assume that it's the same as it was before the restructure.
We can also observe a very subtle change in their philosophy, mainly through their marketing and branding (bye, blue and grey Nintendo). But I'm not going to assert that this is a key point in differentiating the situations.
But the point still stands. The Wii U and the Switch situations are not very similar at all. So coming into the thread and asserting that the Wii U is good prior evidence as to what can happen isn't conducive to the discussion. Sure, we should make sure not to overhype the power of the system, but at the same time, we can't concretely take the negativest-Nancy approach.