You need to look at how the market actually works before you can speculate about when a company will release a new hardware revision.
The life cycle of a console involves a large expenditure -- negative cash flow -- at the beginning, in order to pay for R&D, initial manufacturing, pre-launch advertising, launch game development, etc. As a generation wears on, operating a console hardware business becomes more profitable -- your systems become cheaper to make, your install base gets bigger (which means you sell more total software), etc. In addition, your level of success is generally set fairly early on -- you don't tend to move much up or down the ranks past the first two years you're on the market.
Launching a new console resets everything -- you get a totally new level of success, at the cost of losing your old revenue stream and going through a new negative cash-flow launch period. So, generally, one only does this at a time when you expect that a totally new market will be more desirable than the current one:
* People have started to abandon your system as too old and busted, so you want to kickstart sales.
* A competitor is launching a new system, which will almost inevitably draw away some of your consumers.
* You're losing software support for some reason.
* You're losing, so jumpstarting the next generation gives you a chance to beat the competition.
* Some external factor makes your current situation less profitable than it should be -- like the original Xbox, which was weighted down by a manufacturing/licensing situation that kept the price excessively high.
What you might note about these factors is that
none of them apply to the DS. The system and its games are selling like Pepto Bismol to tourists in Mexico, both hardware and software are individually profitable, there's tons of third party support -- and because the PSP is proving wildly profitable for Sony right now (and helping to offset the costs of the PS3 business) their only competitor isn't likely to launch a new system soon
either. There is literally no reason for Nintendo to even hint at launching a new system, when right now the system is in the sweet spot of constant profit with little work.
You can take all that, and add it to Iwata's repeated statements that he would prefer the company to launch new hardware as rarely as possible -- and then note that neither the DS nor the Wii are going to die due to looking "outdated" any time soon, since both already looked outdated and graphically weak when they launched -- all of which makes it quite clear that unless there's a currently unpredictable shift in the market soon, there's no reason to expect a new DS before 2011.
Kobun Heat said:
I agree that we could see a new DS revision in Japan, which (if properly awesome) could help get sales back up, this year or early next. But the next generation of handhelds? I bet Sony launches before Nintendo.
Yep. And now that the PSP is also officially a profitable success (for Sony, if not necessarily for software developers) I don't know why they'd do it before 2010.
