Its hard to get excited by technology when every price point is four hundred and up. How many items do they want me to have now? phone, watch, tablet, and laptop? Far too many redundancies
A yearly product update is useless for a device that is primarily used to view the internet, check email and watch Netflix or whatever. If it does that when you buy it, it will do it for 4 or 5 years. It lives on the couch or on the bed meaning general wear and tear don't exist much so replacement from damage is a low possibility too.
Apple even help out here because the App Store makes getting old versions of the apps that are supported on your version of the device (where available) transparent, thus the feeling of becoming out-dated is kind of non-existent unless you are a tablet gamer.
For example until last month both me and my partner used a Gen 1 iPad probably for 2 or 3 hours a day every day. I upgraded to a newer version mostly because JS heavy pages like the Guardian and Facebook had started to crash regularly. The latest iterations are so much more powerful that I don't see this being an issue for another 5 years at least.
Sales can be flat even though consumers can be happy with the tech.
And opting out of the upgrade isn't much of an option, due to app upgrades that require the latest OS. And I guess you can also opt out of app upgrades, but then you're left with a 2-year-old+ device and 2-year-old+ software.
Maybe this is intentional. But for me, at least, rather than upgrading, I've learned to just move on to using a combination of my iPhone and MPB, and my iPad (3rd gen) mostly collects dust now.
At the same time, I had a desktop for "heavy lifting" like graphic design and 3d animation, storing a big media library, playing games, etc. I also kept a cheap, portable laptop for the occasional times I needed to travel and wanted some semblance of computing from a hotel room or an event. For all of the other lightweight tasks, I had been using smart phones since the early Treo days so that was fine for email and looking up info.
But then I was planning a longer trip from the US to Southeast Asia for several weeks and it was going to involve a lot of hopping from town to town. Suddenly even my laptop was too much to carry when I already had everything on my back. I caved and bought an iPad 2 for a good deal more than I wanted to spend. They were still hard to find so I could only find the larger capacity models and the only Android tablet worth considering (Xoom) was not as capable and still cost about the same.
That iPad was pretty cool and I used it for a year or two before it just got to be a pain in the ass. Updates were de facto mandatory as you mentioned. Staying on old OS versions meant unsupported apps and constant nagging. But each OS update made the thing perform worse and worse. The hardware cycle was much faster than that of desktop/laptop computers at that point so I couldn't assume the normal 5+ years of usefulness I'd get from a laptop and there's no option to just install a lightweight Linux distro or downgrade. Even after I jailbroke it I couldn't really do much to speed it up. At this point, doing more than opening a single browser tab or lightweight application will make the thing lag and stutter and generall suck.
I think now it gets powered on a few times a year for me to check on updates and see if there's anything worth checking out. Haven't bothered selling it since it's my only iOS device and I figure there may be a point where I want to try some iOS exclusive so I keep it around for that.
But what is the actual problem with that, if you use the tablet primarily as a convenient web browser, Facebook checker, e-mail sender, Netflix watcher, and maybe occasional casual gamer?
Apple has tried to force this kind of stuff onto its user base, but if my experience with family and friends is even remotely representative, the most common result is damaging their customer relations and making a lot of those customers buy exactly one Apple device ever.
The only people I know who have definitely had more than one iPhone or iPad either got a new device via work, got a newer phone "free" when they got a new contract with their network, or had much older versions with pre-Retina screens, much lower storage capacity, and other practical limitations compared to today's devices. To my knowledge, I don't know a single person who has actively and at significant cost paid for, say, a new iPad to replace their 3rd generation one.
In contrast, I know several people who have got some or even all of their money refunded as a direct result of app or iOS updates breaking things. That includes cases like taking a brand new iPad back to the store for a full refund the day after they bought it because they hated it that much (and then buying an Android tablet somewhere else instead) and taking an older iPad back to a store for a significant refund after arguing that the recommend iOS update had made it unfit to use and no mechanism to go back was provided (which was an argument that, to their credit, the store accepted, and they agreed on a modest refund given that the device had been in use for a number of years at that point but had had its useful lifetime abruptly cut off).
Was it still holding a reasonable charge? That's what finally got me to ditch my gen 2 ipad. A plugged in laptop is one thing, but an ipad doesn't want to be tethered.
Plus, an iPad is 1/2 to 1/3rd the cost of an Apple laptop.
YMMV, of course.
Apple products have always been obscenely overpriced, this it a bit easier to digest when you move outside of the Apple ecosphere and new technologies do not have such a financial impact.