Nintendo has moved beyond specs

The official unveiling of the Switch 2 was an incredibly confident moment for Nintendo. It was brief and lacking almost entirely in details. There was no price, no release date, and no confirmed games outside of a Mario Kart tease. The 2 in the name implied a bigger and better Switch, but when it came to the how — the chips that will power the device, the screen that will make Zelda and Mario look great — Nintendo deemed it wasn’t important enough to share right away.

And it’s right: unlike the rest of the industry, Nintendo has carved out a path where specs no longer matter.

It wasn’t always this way. Previous Nintendo consoles were sold, as their contemporaries were, on horsepower. The Super Nintendo was a more-powerful NES, while the N64’s processor was deemed so important that the system was named after it. But things started to change around the time of the GameCube. Nintendo had experienced a steady decline in console sales over subsequent generations; while the NES and Famicom sold more than 60 million units, that was down to just over 20 million for the GameCube. At the same time, Nintendo’s direct competition had changed significantly. After getting a tast …

Read the full story at The Verge.