Not everyone gives two hoots about online.

On the whole, most consumers are pretty stupid.  We sit on this site pretty enlightened but people forget over and over and over and over that the average consumer is not US and usually resembles cattle more than a consumer.   If I look at Sony selling PS2's alongside PS3's for over a year and WII's alongside WIIu for god only knows how long, I see companies taking advantage of a slight profit on a console only to kill themselves down the road when people have no new games to buy for their old hardware.

I think we're going to see a much more rarified environment coming up.  The days of having 2 or 3 different current gen consoles are ending.  The hardware sitting in front of peoples TV's is starting to really pile up and a number of buyers are going to start to see little value in upgrading if they're happy where they are.  As for new stuff, my crystal ball says that people are going to pick a product and stick with it.  

Lastly, why would you risk even ONE customer being unable or unwilling to buy your old games when they got confused and bought old hardware only to find out the new stuff is out and looking much nicer.   Sony talking like PS3 is going to have a 8 plus year lifetime is just stupid IMHO.  They're going to rip customers right out of the teeth of their own PS4.

Wii Mini makes much more snese than Wii - it does not have internet and cannot play GC games.

Wii U is now a much better option!

The Wii Mini is a horrible device. It's expensive, has no internet connectivity, no component output, no GameCube compatability and it looks very ugly. It's probably the gaming system with the least value for your money of all sytems on the market right now.

Just horrible.

It's apparently priced at 79.99 for the UK, which isn't much less than the original Wii, sans a whole bunch of features.
Nintendo don't care that it's causing product confusion they just care about pushing overall wii sales past 100 for the e-PR peen.

Also, if nobody is buying the Wii anymore, and barely anyone is buying the WiiU, what makes them think people will want an older console with LESS features?, That's like Microsoft waiting till 4 months after releasing the 720 to release a smaller xbox 360 without xbox live and a drive that will only read 360 games, senseless, absolutely senseless.

Nintendo hit the self destruct button confirmed.

You know when I first heard about the mini and it not having online I was like "well that sucks".

And then I thought about it and I realized that doesn't really change anything...

(please don't kill me, I like my Wii)

Europe doesn't seem to give a crap about Nintendo these days for whatever reason. Plus it's a pretty crippled machine. Doubt this will push many units.

Ok, I'm going to explain things to you very simply. It may come off as condescending, but I am simply doing this because some forum members get confused very easily.

The first link you provided states "The possibility of Nintendo manufacturing a new 3DS model outside of the 3DS XL is slim. During a recent shareholder meeting (attended and translated by Andriasang), Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said the Mario factory currently has "no plans" in the near future for new models of the portable. This decision, he said, was based in part on an estimation that consumers would be "confused" if there were too many choices."

So the fact that Iwata states that there should be at most 2 versions of the 3DS to avoid confusion is being used to imply that the Wii should have at most 1 version? It does not even touch upon the similarity between the DS and the 3DS, and can thus not realte to the Wii U sounds like Wii argument you are trying to put forward. This is not consumers not knowing what name corresponds to what product, it's consumers getting confused by there being multiple products and them being confused as to which is best for them.

The 2nd link is an opinion piece from some random blogger. He provides no facts, no data, nothing to support his argument. If I were to be swayed by this second link, I would have been swayed by your original post.

The 3rd link is a perfect example of why you are wrong. Nobody knows things untill they are taught them. You or I will find out about the 3DS, and that it is a new console from a gaming forum. 'The average consumer' will post on about.com, and they received a well written answer that explained it to them. So all you proved with this link was that, from our sample size of 2 people, 100% of them know that the 3DS is a new console. Due to the low sample size, this is not quite PROOF that I am right, but it is pretty good evidence in my favor.

The 4th has all the problems of the 2nd, and it doesn't even mention the fact that the 3DS and DS have similar names. It mentions that they look similar, which again, hasn't stopped people from knowing about iphone versions, nor is it even relevant to the WiiU, where the box has a big tablet thing on the front that is bigger than the console itself.

How about these, Scottie?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=+site:answers.yahoo.com+why+dont+3ds+games+work+on+my+dsi&sa=X&ei=vVEvUYzaNY6R0QXTuIHwBg&ved=0CFoQrQIwBQ&biw=320&bih=533

Clearly plenty of people were confused. Using apple products, which are FAR more popular and recieve FAR more marketing/media attention is silly IMO.

To put this "brilliant" marketing strategy into words.

"We're going to re-release our last generation console, during the first 3 months of our next-generation console launch window, in an attempt to increase sales of our last generation console and offset the losses we're taking with our next-generation console."

This decision is going to become like the worst meme in internet gaming history.... "We messed up so bad with wiiu, that we're going back to wii!"