SHIELD at 10: NVIDIA says it will keep making the 2019 Shield TV
In an interview with Ars Technica, Andrew Bell, NVIDIA’s senior VP of hardware engineering, said the company has “no plans to stop production or updates” for Shield “any time soon.” Bell added that NVIDIA still manufactures the 2019 Shield because people keep buying it, and sales volume has stayed roughly flat for about 10 years.
If you owned any Android hardware, then you should know that long support window is rare. Bell said Shield support was treated as a commitment from the start, and the team still ships maintenance updates for models going back to the 2015 launch. Those early units have moved from Android 5.0 to Android 11 , with ongoing bug fixes and occasional features.
Bell revealed that many early employees wanted to build a game console, and Shield became a way to build a “full-stack” consumer device once the missing pieces were in place. That started with Tegra, then Android TV in 2014, and then the 2015 Shield TV that launched with a gaming-first pitch, including local games and cloud streaming via GeForce Now.
“Pretty much everybody who worked at Nvidia in the early days really wanted to make a game console”
— Andrew Bell, NVIDIA
That console ambition also connects to Nintendo. Shield uses a Tegra X1 Arm chip, and Nintendo picked the same family for the original Switch. Bell explained that security and DRM work tied to Tegra became one of the reasons Shield updates slowed publicly in 2023 and 2024, before resuming in 2025 with a larger behind-the-scenes effort to improve the security stack on older Shield generations.
Swith 1 and Switch 2, Source: Nintendo
For now, NVIDIA’s message is that the 2019 Shield stays in production, and the update pipeline continues. NVIDIA claims the same steady stream of buyers shows up each week regardless, so the company is sticking with the hardware and the long-term support plan.
On the game console angle, NVIDIA is already shipping chips to Nintendo in massive volumes. That raises the question of how much more presence NVIDIA needs in this space. For now, the first all-NVIDIA gaming-focused hardware looks set to arrive in the form of upcoming N1-series gaming laptops . We’ll see how that plays out.
Source: Ars Technica
