I'm not sure I believe that Sony would have the handheld be dockable. You can get away with a lot more on a small screen be it just 720p or 1080p. But people are fine with the PS5 outputting that already and just scaling it up.
Why wouldn't it be a dockable? A dockable handheld just gives them more options, same with customers, and also makes the product more appealing overall. The point of the dockable in this case would be to enable higher performance without worrying over thermal limits & battery life when portable.
Plus other options, like providing more storage options and ethernet support. I'd be quite interested if Sony/SIE could do a portable with a segmented approach where the parts combine together into a portable format, such as having the screen be a separate component attachable to a processing base, and swappable button modules. There hasn't really been a portable yet like that (hell, maybe Switch 2 is doing something like this?), and I think this way you could in theory make an option for a lower-cost home system by just getting the processing base and the dock, then combining them together.
If you want to make it portable, then take the base off the dock and slap the screen on the base, swap in some button modules and you're good to go. The way I'm describing it now really seems like something Nintendo would do, but barring they don't with Switch 2, it could be a neat concept for a new PlayStation handheld (or even the rumored Xbox handheld).
Let Sony focus on powerful home consoles and Nintendo on their handhelds. Historically that has worked best.
That won't be realistic for much longer. Sony can't keep pursuing "high-end" performance home consoles to the point where they price out most of the lower-end market, and Nintendo will eventually have to shift hardware performance upward to meet what's considered a new baseline, which also increases game budgets some.
Hardware is no longer the limiting factor in AAA game visuals & performance. Time of development, budget costs, and amount of required manpower are the real reasons it's taking longer and longer to get those big AAA games. The main benefits future hardware can bring are in areas of RT, frame generation, AI image filter generation, areas of automated LOD generation in real-time, etc. Things best served with dedicated silicon and specific software packages.
I'm not going to be surprised if the next Xbox console-like system and even the PS6 are not leaps above PS5 Pro when it comes to pure TF, or don't have a 4x increase in memory bandwidth, or 64 GB of RAM etc. That's not going to suddenly get us games that look like Endgame or Avatar 2. Smarter technologies that cut down significantly on TOD, budget, and required manpower (but in non-scummy ways) are what will help in that. Which would mean everyone can develop games much faster and at more sensible budgets over the long-term.
And as for Nintendo specifically; they are a toy company at heart and I mean that in a good way. It means they will always find ways of viewing games from an aspect of fun and wonder, which reflects in their hardware, which then reflects in their software and the inverse being true. There's no other company in gaming with that type of spirit, particularly when married with Nintendo's catalog of games. So it doesn't matter if they start making semi-home consoles or even home consoles wholly again, or if Sony start making portables again. I don't think that's going to cause either to suddenly forget where their strengths are, and to synergize them with what they do going forward.
