The Annual Wanting

The ghost of Steve Jobs wants your money. Four products, one keynote, four different ways to feel inadequate about whatever you currently own.

The iPad mini arrived first—7.9 inches, ten hours of battery, starting at $329—for everyone who found the regular iPad too large and the iPhone too small but somehow managed to own both anyway. Then the new iMac, which is thinner than any desktop computer has any right to be, with a display so good it produces a faint, almost embarrassing grief when you stare at it long enough. The Mac mini for people who want serious processing power without the theater. And the new MacBook Pro, which costs more than it should and is unambiguously the most attractive laptop I’ve ever seen. Carry one into any coffee shop full of designers and developers and watch what happens to the room. It’s obscene, honestly.

None of this is entirely rational and Apple knows it. The products are genuinely good—I can’t pretend otherwise—but the real achievement is the machinery that makes you want them before you’ve even touched them. If you bought all four, I hope you find something worth doing with them.