Are you implying that the PS4 won't launch for 3-4 years? I can't imagine Sony launching 3 years after MS it'd probably piss the third parties off a lot

Next Box being far better than the PS3
PS4 being far better than the Next Box

And if MS had a 3 year advantage I doubt third parties would care much for the extra power the PS4 has. I think they'll both launch at similar times they'll want to keep the third parties on their side and allow for good multiplatform engines to be made, so I can't imagine more than a year between their launches

Doubtful, that didn't work out for them too well this gen, If Sony has a brain left in their CEOs, I think it will only be marginally (if at all) better.

Anyway, to take a wild stab in the dark...

Xbox 5.5 years

Wii 5.5 Years

PS4 6 years 

I understand, but given the paradigm shift to gaining relatively high margins on the device itself, I cannot see them wanting to continue selling a relatively low margin $100-150 Wii alongside the N7. In addition to that they probably wouldn't want to keep a console on market for the issues of the complexity to support circa 2000 technology 12 years after release with software.

Who would buy a $150 Wii when you could get a $200-$250 N7 with 30* the performance and with whatever new innovative features they might add?

I would say PS3 and 360 3-4 years and Wii having 6-7 years left.

High margins on hardware is hardly a paradigm shift. Infact one could argue that if one does a thing for their entire existence (yes, even when they sold card they made a good profit on the hardware), then continues to do it, it is exactly the opposite of a paradigm shift

I would certainly buy a $250 N7 over a $100 Wii, as would most of the people on this or any other forum. However, a lot of people would choose the much cheaper option. Like the PS2, the Wii will continue to get the Guitar Heroes and maddens for a long time, and it will have a massive backlog of extended audience Nintendo games

Also, 30 tiems the power of the Wii for the N7? Really Squilliam?

i think the ps3 will try to release the new playstation at the same time as the new xbox because they saw it was a mistake to start behind and still be playing catch up a few years later. I think the wii successor will come out before both because microsoft and sony are still investing too heavily in their current consoles to put another one in the market soon.
As we see with the 3ds, nintendo could release their new console even while their wii is extremely profitable. If the next nintendo console isn't just an hd wii though, and tries different controls. I can see the wii selling for years and years. Maybe even another decade.

Shouldn't we wait for the N6 before talking about N7? I didn't read the whole thread though, so if you already went past it, then NVM.

Nah, Wii is both the N5 and N6 on account of being 2 Gamecubes duct taped togehter

Do we really need another generation right now? Developers take years to release games, needing so much time and money, putting a company in jeopardy if a game fails to sell millions. I'm not against progress, but we'll probably be left with a few big names to compete against each other, the smaller companies will stick to creating portable games and shun home consoles.

Sorry, not a paradigm shift but I couldn't think of anything better to call it.

Why would anyone buy a Wii when they can get a system which plays all the Wii titles, upscales them, plugs into the TV via HDMI and plays all the newer titles for merely another $100-$150 more? What does Nintendo get out of it? They get lower margins and no fringe benefits for market share and 3rd party attention in the next generation. It simply doesn't make sense outside of the third world to release a console with such low margins which competes against their own higher margin products.

Yep and I stand by the 30* stance I made. The PS2 was 6.2 Gflops peak and the PS3 is >150 Gflops peak which is about a 30* increase. Since the PS3 has 600M transistors, they ought to be able to fit ~1.2B transistors into ~100mm^2 on the 28nm process at Global Foundries which translates into roughly double the performance and probably more in real world scenarios due to much greater efficiency per transistor, high memory bandwidth etc.