N3DS on americas in 2015
3DS sucessor in 2016
Wii U sucessor in 2017

sorry padib, nintendo confirmed N3ds in 2015 already

sometime close to when they announced it for Japan, they already said it would be arriving in japan in 2014 and everywhere else 2015 (except australia, because they're lucky)

Really?  If anything, Nintendo seems to be trending in the opposite direction, moving away from the big tv experience (making it optional i.e. gamepad offtv play) favoring smaller form factor instead.

If you believe the Fusion rumors, then Nintendo will make a more powerful handheld than usual, with the home version about 4x that power.  So lets say the Fusion HH has qHD or native Vita res (possibly a 1080p screen, but upscaled), then the home version will be native 1080p.  I expect the home version, (at least their first iteration in their Fusion line of products) to be weaker than XB1 but about 2-3X Wii U in raw power.  I expect Nintendo to move toward the middle and replace Vita as the premium HH.  So going by gflops HH = 200 home = 800.

The next gen of Ninty HW is only to host their rich and more diversified library by unifying the SW.  I still expect the same price format with certain games more suitable for HH etc but choosing how to play will be up to the consumer.  I predict there will be a family of Fusion products that starts off with the HH then home console.  Higher end versions might come later, only if there is demand for it to serve AAA 3rd parties.  

The great thing about a diverse HW offering is Nintendo won't be locked in to one that may flop, and they'll have better control  of production for the more popular versions.  Its a fail-proof method for Nintendo to profit.  And even if some people think its an illusion to have the software united under a platform (some ppl dont like HH games) , fact is, for Nintendo fans, it will be great and a sure success.

1. "Why has seemingly no successful home console had a lifespan as short as that? 

You answered your own question. No successful console had a lifespan that short. The Wii U is not a successful console. The Xbox was not a successful console. The Master's System was not a successful console. Even the GCN had a shorter life cycle than planned because it wasn't successful, as the Wii was originally a GCN accessory. They killed off dying consoles to make way for vastly more successful ones. The Xbox brand jumped from 25m to 80m because of this. Nintendo went from 22m to 100m. You think that the Wii U's situation isn't desprate? You think it's not getting completely destroyed by the competition? You think the PS4 and XBO don't have a huge market that Nintendo has failed to tap into? Nintendo has set itself up for a textbook reason why consoles lives are cut short to begin with. The GCN was able to live longer than the Wii U will because it didn't participate in almost three years of lost profit. It was a commercial failure, but not a financial one. The Wii U is both.

No one would be claiming that a Wii U successor would release in 2016 if the Wii U was actually successful. That's just obvious. It has no future. The Wii U's two most financially powerful console movers, Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, are already out. Nothing the Wii U outputs from now on will be moving the amount of consoles that those did. Not Zelda. Not Metroid. Not Star Fox. Not Xenoblade. Short of an unpredictable sleeper hit, sales will be on a steady decline from now on. It's past it's peak already, and they'll be preparing the new console with a better chance for success.

2. You're cherry picking. The N3DS will have new games you can't play on the OG 3DS.  The Wii U successor will do the same. Even if the Wii U successor will have more exclusives, the point remains that if you want those new games, you must to buy the new system to play them on.

3. I never said that it would be weak. What makes you think that shared architeture makes for weaker hardware. The Wii U is weaker than the competition by design. They didn't just stop one day and say "welp, that's all we can do. This architecture just isn't powerful enough." They were weighing the price vs. the performance, and then slapped a gamepad onto the thing. It's was as poweful as any new $250 console would be, and then they added $100 on top of that with the gamepad. If they set the price goal for the Wii U to be $400 without needing to factor in the gamepads price or the price for a bigger internal HD like with the PS4 and XBO, the Wii U would be the most powerful console on the market today.

Think about the type of games Nintendo makes. You think SM3DW is pushing the Wii U? Tropical Freeze? W101? Pikmin 3? Mario Kart 8? Smash? So many of the games Nintendo will always make are not pushing hardware from a gameplay perspecting. It's purely graphical. All those games can pretty much be scaled down graphically and play on the Wii with not many changes. Even something like Bayonetta 2 could, even though the Wii U is monumentally more powerful than the Wii.

Now think about all the games the Wii U's successor will have that are in similar situations. Sure they'd be scaled down and maybe lack some features, but that's what would prompt Wii U owners to upgrade sooner. The Wii U version would be like Smash 3DS, but upgrading to it's successor will make it the vastly superior Smash Wii U, and you'd only have to buy it once, and all your save data would be transferred because they'd literally be the same game just unlocking different features depending on which system you pop the disc into. 

I don't think 3rd parties are truly a factor for Nintendo anymore. If they truly are basing the successor's architecture on the Wii U, it most likely won't be x86, which still makes porting a financial issue, even if it truly is much more powerful than the PS4 and XBO. I'm betting on this new platform being Nintendo's first focused attempt at being truly self sufficient, much like what Disney has done. As for the PS5 and new Xbox, I honestly see neither of them releasing anything until winter 2020 at the earliest. The hardware may be obsolete way before then, but as long as they continue selling like they are, they'll be supported. So, even if the Wii U successor does get good 3rd party support, it'll have a comfortable amount of years before it needs to worry about becoming outdated again.

Again, it won't set any such expectation. No one thought the 360 would have a short lifespan just because the original Xbox did. The Wii U is selling abysmally, so it's reasonable to expect a shorter, yet still reasonable, lifespan. The console's successor will have a completely new chance at life with a huge market to tap into. If Nintendo does everything right, the way Microsoft did in marketing the 360, there's no reason it can't be a game changer for Nintendo. I think that anyone thinking that Sony's screw up was the only factor is seriously discrediting what Microsoft was able to acheive with the 360's commercial success.

The difference between the PS4 to XBO vs the Wii U to Wii U successor is that the NNID family with be built with the expressed focus of sharing a library. That makes it infinitely less complicated. The PS4 and XBO have completely different architecture from each other. They have similarities, sure, but they are not built to be coordinated with each other. You can't take a PS4 disk and pop it into an XBO and expect it to work. But you absolutely can take a PC game and play it on both a weaker and stronger PC, with varying results. Same with mobile games. If I play a mobile game on my iphone, and then play the same game on the ipad, I'm still playing the same game, but on more powerful hardware. That's what Nintendo want to do. While that focus will land primarily on the relationship between the new handheld and console, the Wii U will birth that relationship. It's basically the original iphone of this family of systems.

And even still, the PS4 and XBO are competing against each other. Those discrepancies matter. With the Wii U and it's successor, they don't. They aren't supposed to be the same. One version of the game is supposed to be the clear superior version. The Monster Hunter is an example. Smash Bros is another. You're supposed to look and say "I can keep my weaker hardware and still play the games, but I can buy the newer system and have better looking and performing versions of those same games." The difference in power between the 3DS and the Wii U is monumental, and yet they both have great versions of the newest Smash Bros.

Like I keep saying, most Nintendo games don't need to make full use of the hardware when it comes to features. Most of the games won't truly need the 8GB+ of ram that the new console may provide, just like the newest Smash Bros didn't truly need to be 1080p. It's just a perk you get from having the more powerful hardware that you'd be willingly buying out of by not upgrading yet. It's not that they'd have to adjust every game to work on the Wii U, but that most games will naturally by design be simple enough to need very little effort to get it to work fine on the Wii U, because that's simply the nature of most Nintendo games. And of course there will be titles that come along like Zelda U and X for the Wii U that just won't be possible on the weaker consoles, and those will just be full blown exclusives, just like Xenoblade on the N3DS. You say that games have to run properly on all platforms, when in actuality, only some games do. If they have a game that is too grand to be ported down to the Wii U or next handheld, they obviously just won't do it. I never said the library would be fully shared, but it'll be shared enough to make the transition easier than it has ever been.

Even your Ice Climbers point doesn't work. Smash 3DS is meant to support two living consoles. Wii U successor games won't be, so they won't need to make those kinds of sacrifices. Smash was trying to sell Wii U's and 3DS's. Games for the Wii U successor won't be trying to sell Wii U's at all. Even still, I'm sure that if the most significant omision in Smash because of weaker hardware is the Ice Climbers, the next consoles games will be fine, as the gap between it and the Wii U will naturally be much smaller than the gap between the 3DS and the Wii U. As far as third party games, they wouldn't care about parity between the versions when downscaling like Nintendo does. The versions on weaker hardware will either be worse, or not exist at all on those platforms. 

Smaller installed base equals lower revenues from accessories and software. It's pretty logical. So if their hardware and software sales are at historical lows, then you can more then likely assume that accessories sales are also at all time lows. It's just plain logic. And no, amiibos aren't going to save a billion dollar corporation like Nintendo unless they sell hundreds of millions which is obviously not going to happen. They're going to make Nintendo a pretty penny, but no where near enough to cover their decline in HW and SW sales.

This thread is almost not worthy of a reply.

This is amazingly poor journalism. That is not any confirmation of anything. EVERY company has R&D that is always churning out new ideas for the future of the company. All Miyamoto did was confirm that a team exists that is looking at the future of Nintendo. This was no different than the day Wii U launched.

New hardware is probable to come same time it has always been probable to come. 2016 or 2017 at the latest.

i'm starting to think that this new 3ds is going to be around longer than I thought.

*Applauds*

You said it well.

Sorry nintendo, i dont care anymore. I sold my 3ds and wiiu (after a long monster hunter year) to buy a ps4. For me, it was the best decision. I play the major games there, and i havent thought about mario etc. Ever since. And why? I am soooo tired of the 100th mario kart, smash bros or mario plattformer. I still got my n64 and wii. This covers me with the best parts of those series. Only a good zelda would have convinced me. But i am tired of waiting. Maybe they see me if they come up with convincing new ips.

Sorry guys