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HappySqurriel on 03 February 2011
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trestres said:

They have always redesigned their portables. It's more of an item of fashion, their redesigns were almost always aesthetic or to make the console smaller.

They have only redesigned the NES and the SNES, but both of them were launched after the new console had arriived, and there was room for making it smaller. Even then, they lost features instead of gaining new ones, so I don't actually see it happening for the Wii because:
Nintendo hasn't redesigned their last 2 home consoles and they were selling quite badly, so why didn't they do it if it would have been financially correct?
Nintendo can't make the Wii smaller, more energy efficient or reliable without taking away parts from it.
Nintendo released the NES and SNES redesigns AFTER the new gen consoles had arrived to get a few more sales from collectionists.
A redesigned Wii would just change it's exterior form, not affect the size. That's what limited editions and different colors are here for.

Lots could be done to reduce the size of the Wii, I'm not sure if changes like that would be seen as being meaningful though ...

Simply moving from their current DVD drive (which is the same proportions as a PC-DVD drive) to a slot loading laptop DVD drive would dramatically reduce the size of the Wii; and if they moved to a 32nm manufacturing process and reduced the size of their GPU and CPU (possibly integrating them onto a single chip) they could produce a system which was (roughly) the same size as their slot loading laptop DVD player. About the only components that would be at risk of being removed would be the Gamecube controller ports; but I'm certain an intelligent designer could find a way to integrate them into a (slightly) larger design.