Apple moves at a steady and surprisingly predictable pace (at least once they have introduced a new product). They have a small lineup and they often replace products instead of continuing to sell both products. They take good care of making sure that they never have too many or too similar products.

For me those are great virtues. Those are things that make Apple a great company that understands me.

Those are also things that make some people claim that Apple is running some sort of scheme to always get you to buy the newest stuff. I think that’s a bullshitty strawman.

I guess I've been lucky to not get roped into that thinking. I'm still happy using my refurbished first gen iPad and a mid 2009 Macbook Pro. But I will admit that I think I might grab an iPad mini when a retina display gets added in.

A case in point:

http://www.splatf.com/2012/11/ipad-mini/

7 inch tabets are stupid, 10 inch tablets are perfect, but actually now that Apple's released a 7.9 inch tablet it turns out that that is the perfect size.

(7 inch tablets are still stupid by the way, I don't think the community has settled on a rationalisation for this. They could have gone for 16:9 being the wrong ratio, but it turns out, after the iPhone 5 adopted it, that it was actually very good for video.)