• The Wall Street Journal, Monday, January 14, 2008 12 PM

By constantly redesigning its products and introducing new ones-- and then trumpeting the changes in high-profile marketing campaigns--Apple has habituated many of its customers to living in a continuous upgrade cycle for new gadgets. The risk is that it may disappoint consumers who feel their new purchases are instantly outmoded.

The Fox comedy show "MADtv" captured this recently in a spoof of an iPod advertising campaign featuring the musician Feist. In the segment, a look-alike for the Canadian singer croons about her unhappiness after a $400 iPod purchase at an Apple store. "And just after my purchase was done," she sings, "those Apple bastards introduced a new one."

Those sentiments are likely to be shared by some Apple customers after this coming week's Macworld conference in San Francisco. "Given the fact that the pace of Apple product improvements is between two times and four times faster than PC-based products, Apple buyers will always have a higher degree of buyer's remorse," says Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

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