I would agree with you, I guess it's a sign of the times though as I would imagine Apple put in a great deal of time and thought into what the market would bear.

PS: I also have a hard time wrapping my head around why people pay for novelty skins for their avatars in games. But they do!!

I think that's a good analogy. I do occasionally spend a bit more for something a bit nicer. In this case, I guess my confusion is more a matter of degree. Would I trade in my iPad 3 for basically the same use but just very smooth? I haven't found myself remembering the times when I used my iPad $1k more, but I do remember the sort of magical feeling I got when playing around with it for the first time. The mac is a similar comparison. Now that all macs have great SSDs and great screens, what would it take for me to upgrade? Stands to reason that I'd more likely run into a real performance wall, so that extra 16gb of ram might make me switch, but the last few times it was because 1) stolen 2) numerous hardware failures 3) Upgraded from 2009 mbp because it couldn't effectively play 1080p video, the graphics card was failing, and the retina screen.