It was painfully underpowered when it launched. The SoC in it was already 2 years old, the Switch is basically a mid-range smartphone from 2015 that launched in 2017.
Wasn’t the SOCs in Xbox and PlayStation also old on launch.
It takes a fuckton of time to make hardware like that.
The SoCs in the Xbox One and PS4 both use highly custom AMD Jaguar SoCs with more powerful graphics capability than AMD included in their home release version of their Jaguar APUs. The Jaguar architecture launched mid-2013. The Xbox One and PS4 both launched in November 2013.
Compared to the Switch, which uses a slightly modified nVidia Tegra X1 chip, that is actually underclocked. The nVidia Shield TV was more powerful as it did not underclock the X1 chip (Switch is about 780Mhz (docked BTW, an undocked Switch runs at a measly 300MHz) while Shield TV is 1Ghz). The Tegra X1 launched in 2015, and the Switch launched in 2017.
