According to comments made by Furukawa during Nintendo’s recent shareholder Q&A, the plan is to utilise the existing Nintendo Account system to make the jump to the next generation as smooth as possible for customers. Here’s part of what Nintendo’s president had to say, courtesy of a translation by Twitter user Genki:
Shuntaro Furukawa: “As for the transition from Nintendo Switch to the next generation machine, we want to do as much as possible in order to smoothly transition our customers, while utilizing the Nintendo Account.”
There’s been lots of rumours regarding the existence and the chips and etc. The only thing official before this was “We have no plans to release new hardware before the next fiscal year.”, i.e. April 2024 is the earliest we could see it.
Some people also see the whole “Nintendo telling the Mario + Rabbids crew they should have waited for the next console for the sequel” thing to mean a new console is somewhat near. I don’t believe that’s indicative of that though.