One thing is that pretty much of the purpose of buying into these flagship products is the fulfilment/pride of ownership of the best. Once it becomes second to something new, the purpose is defeated at the time of the announcement of the new product. The owner would get a similar feeling as if he has just retired from an important job position and suddenly no one cares about him. You either lose much of the joy with the gear, or you keep spending more money to buy newer gear.
The other thing is that these technology advancements are real.
It's said that Bill Gates said something like "640K RAM ought to be enough for anyone." In year 2017, even with 8GB RAM a PC can lag from time to time surfing the internet with lots of tabs opened with AdBlock plugins.
A Leaf DCB II Live (year 1996) has 4MP resolution, but easily gets beaten down by an iPhone in year 2017.
Digital backs are electronic devices and are therefore subject to depreciation in a Moore's law-style. It's a bit different from cars - you can still drive old skool muscle cars, but you can no longer surf the internet freely with an old computer running Windows 98.
An iPhone 7 Plus has a screen with a resolution of 1920 × 1080. An Eizo CG318-4k has a resolution of 4096 x 2160. News says that Dell is going to ship a 8k monitor with a resolution of 7680 x 4320. These new displays ruthlessly make the images taken by a Canon 1Ds (11MP) look soft.
Yes, but so what? The truth is that for the majority of snappers the digital age has already surpassed what they can usefully use. That being the case, there is no logical argument for that majority to get anything else.
Look, in my own career, though I grew up professionally in the LF world and printing from nothing other than 4x5 and upwards, five days a week for about six years, when I went out on my own I lived very easily on a staple diet of 135 and 120 formats. They did everything I was ever asked to do, including multi-page advertorials for UK
Vogue, the
IWS and several clothing manufacturers; I produced very expensive bespoke company calendars and travelled pretty much to all the exotic places I had the urge to visit, shooting on just those two formats.
In today's world, where less and less is going to be seen in quality paper magazines and more and more on a rotten little screen that lives in somebody's pocket or handbag, even 120 film format is overkill, and probably 135 film too.
One of the best photographers to grace this site is perfectly happy to use a tiny digital for some work; that's realism.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with anyone, with the pockets that allow it, to keep buying the latest iteration of whatever gives him his woodies. All I'm pointing out is that, from the perspective of real world use, unless he's a pro with some specialist needs, he'd be doing more popular good just walking down the street and buying some buskers a cup of coffee. They might even give him access to some great photographs on his smartphone as reward. Spreading the joy, as it were.
;-)
Rob C