In the long arc of technological stewardship, Nintendo quietly documented a vision of hardware that remembers its own history — a dock capable of serving two generations of console without asking the household to choose between them. Filed in January 2025 and surfaced in China this month, the patent describes an adaptive device that reads which Switch is connected and reconfigures itself accordingly, a small but telling gesture toward the idea that progress need not abandon what came before. Whether this vision ever becomes something a person can hold in their hands remains, as with so many pa