Because they construct reliable hardware out of the gate.

Kinda offtopic, but has anyone ever thought about how big the "true" install bases of the 3 companies are? I think about this all the time since me and one of my friends are still playing our launch Wii's but several of our PS360 friends are into their second or third console due to malfunctions and/or newer model upgrades. Is there a way to tackle this topic scientifically ?

@RedInker: Perfection is a little too much but I really think that Nintendo values reliability and power efficiency more than the other 2 manufacturers.

So that means every Nintendo portable was flawed ?

Redesigning a console doesn't imply it is a bad hardware set up. In many cases it is just for re-branding sake. To keep the same platform new and fresh.

Had the Playstation family never seen redesigns, they would've sold less than they did.

Maybe it costs a bit to redesign.

One thing Nintendo's guilty is making their redesigned home consoles look worse than before! EXCEPT for the famicom 2, which is cute as a baby!

Obviously, it was never released

They gained more sales than the competition without it

yeah make micro mini wii...
they do that alot on their handheld though... i think it is their 18 month cycle

From a business perspective it makes sense to release a new model every now and then, to keep the "old system" fell new and fresh, thus more sales.

From a consumer perspective it's better to stay with just one model because that means we don't have to worry for a new redesign, which is probably cheaper, and fell that we should have waited longer to buy the model. Kinda like the people who bought the PS3 slim one week before the super slim, that most have suck...

For handhelds I can see why they do redesgins.  Longer battery life and redegined controls.

For consoles its only to reduce the size and make them cosnume less enegry (usually).

With Nintendo's consoles always coming small and power efficent out of the gate what's the point of redesgining thier consoles?

Either way, I'm not a fan of rebuying a console or handheld anyways, I can just see the reason why others would though.

Me never upgrading  my orginal GBA, DS phantom, or regular 3DS are proof of that.

They change the colors of their home consoles, which are as close to a redesign as possible. Size and form haven't been an issue for the past few generations, so there's been no reason to do anything beyond a color update.

Wii was tiny and elegant. Wii U is surprisingly still tiny and elegant. I think other than offering more colors, there is no need to monkey with the home consoles.

The reason they dink with the portables is because people actuall touch those things to use them. It makes sense to have better form factors, making them lighter, more battery life, bigger screen.

When it make sense, they did revise the Wii remote control from Wii Motion to Wii Motion+. The Classic was crap and so they came out with Classic Pro.

X360 had need/opportunity to fix some internal component issues and released a new form factor now called "slim" which made the failure rates significantly lower.

I have no idea why Sony keeps wasting internal R&D on PS3 redesigns when none of that has resulted in reducing price or improving quality (which was already good on everything after the original 20/60GB models which did overheat more than everything 2nd gen onwards). The newest redesigned shell for PS3 shows Sony priorities are all wrong.