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Because they aren't targeting the people who upgrade every year. The current iPads (and iPhones) are for the people with 4-5 year old devices.

For them it's not an "incremental upgrade", 4-5 yearly incremental upgrades sums up to one big upgrade.

There are enough people every year who need a new tablet. Millions of people would've bought iPad 3 years ago, for them this would be significant upgrade.

Doing updates every few years means half the internet is going to spend 2 of every 3 years complaining "I don't want to buy a years-old device" and asking "should I wait, is there going to be a new one soon?".

Continuous delivery has also shown itself to be a much more reliable way to deliver technology products at all. Compared to shipping 10 new features in a year, shipping 30 new features in 3 years is much more than 3x harder.

The short answer is because people will pay for them.