Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand.<p>More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998, was the first GameBoy to feature a non-monochrome display: a feature the Sega GameGear had, with its 8-bit color and a backlit display, in 1990.<p>Nintendo seems to be consistently about a decade behind the current standard of technology, but they innovate in such clever and serendipitous ways that their "Ludditism" is easy to forgive.