Never, but the yearly iterations are there to keep people upgrading. Same thing with cars.
Some people need the newest hottest thing when they could upgrade every 5-7 years (10-15 in the case of cars) and be fine and companies cash in on that.
It was roughly 2 years between the M1 and M2 which is a longer time between generation refreshes than Intel and about on par with AMD. The A series updates roughly as often as the top tier Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 processors. Apple really isn’t doing anything outside of industry norms here.
Yeah I think what the guy above is missing is the concept that companies schedule certain performance aspects on a timer so that they can release things in the most financially beneficial release cycle with only enough performance benefit to maximize their sales numbers. People seem to think that tech companies like these are releasing their very best product at coincidentally regular intervals with surprisingly similar performance increases
