It's not uncommon for releases to correspond, but I don't think the reason is to ease people into the next gen. Rather, it's more that the current flagship product is being repositioned as a value product to sell alongside the new one. As part of that, it's only logical to cut the production cost down as much as possible. But, it's also probably why you often see features cut as well. Whether "higher end" features like stereo A/V (NES 2, Genesis 3) or S-Video (SNES 2), or expansion features that had little or no official use such as Parallel and Serial ports on the PSOne and the lack of space for the HDD on the PS2 Slim.Konacha wrote: As I said, it was what I heard but I wasn't 100% sure since I didn't go and research it to death, though granted it will be a cost-cutting measure I would imagine if they re-design the motherboard but also I've notice companies normally introduce a new version of their systems to help people ease into the next gen systems better.
I would say the "ease of transition" feature is backwards compatibility on the new system, which has more recently been left to stagnate (360) or removed from later models (Wii, PS3).