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Did you watch it?

I didn’t. Nor did anyone I know.

Apple has been turning press release material about new products and upgrades into special events broadcast around the world for more than a decade — and the buzz has been legit. Consumers and critics chatter online about these new products for weeks leading up to the events, speculating what the tech titan has been secretly designing on its Cupertino campus.

But this time around, when Apple announced upgrades and product redesigns at its “Far Out” event on Wednesday, only true Apple nerds seemed to care. Even Eve Jobs, the daughter of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, mocked the event on her Instagram story, showing a meme of a man holding up a plaid shirt identical to the one he’s wearing with the caption, “Me upgrading from iPhone 13 to iPhone 14 after Apple’s announcement today.”

Another great line from the comments of an online blog about it: “(Far Out) is a reference to the price of the new iPhone. Far out of reach of mere mortals.”

I feel the same way most years, when Apple reveals its newest lineup of smartphones, laptops and other gadgets that don’t seem very different from what I dropped an entire paycheck on the year before.

In a word: underwhelmed.

And yet, here I am, reading about the new, that I don’t need, a camera with a faster aperture that I don’t need, and a crash detection feature that I don’t need. And I’m thinking, “Maybe?”

Apple is the master of getting into my head like this. I already own two MacBook Pros, a MacBook Air from 2011 (that still works), a 27-inch iMac that’s somewhere in the back of my closet, Apple TV, an Apple Watch, an iPhone 13, a pair of Air Pods, a classic iPod that might be worth more than it cost when I bought it and an iShuffle that won’t even charge. Now I’m almost convinced that this new iPhone could save my life. (I mean, what’s $1,099 when you’re talking about your life?)

And there it is: The idea that I may need an overpriced upgrade to a phone that I already own, that works just fine.

This is how on the planet by market cap at nearly $2.5 trillion as of September.

It has created what’s referred to as an ecosystem. Apple has carefully and systematically designed a user and lifestyle experience — also called a “walled garden” — starting with the launch of the first iPhone in 2007. It’s a system-wide integration where having more Apple products results in a better user experience.

It’s not something the company talks about — and definitely not something it outright sells — but it’s why we plunk down hundreds of dollars on products we probably don’t need but feel like we can’t live without. Like using your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac or responding to iMessages from your laptop (which is, to me, the absolute greatest thing in the world).

But in this day, where people are struggling with health care costs, housing costs, unemployment, the rising price of everything from used cars to steaks, combined with a sensitivity toward frivolous spending and over-consumption and its impact on the environment, it seems irresponsible to drop $1,000 on a new phone when I already have a working one.

And it also seems irresponsible for a company worth trillions to continue to push out high-priced products and entice consumers to buy buy buy when it’s really not necessary.

So why do I feel the urge to rush down to my nearest Apple Store and buy a purple iPhone with a new feature called “dynamic island” that I still don’t quite understand? Or new Air Pods that have a button at the bottom of the case that alerts you to the location of your missing earbuds? Or an Apple Watch with a compass or one that can predict my ovulation?

Because, as journalist J.B. MacKinnon , “The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves,” we can’t stop shopping — and yet we must.

“It is another of consumerism’s ironies that, although it functions like a mental trap, we often think of it as an escape.” A very misguided and expensive mistake — and one that I won’t make today.

I’m holding out for the iPhone 15.