Did Apple just turn your iPad 3 into a worthless pile of junk?

I'm writing this on a 2011 iMac, and until twelve hours ago I thought it was a beautiful, powerful computer. Now, though, I realise that it's a great big pile of crap.

Without warning, let alone an apology, Apple has ruined my life.

From today, anybody who looks at my iMac will know that it isn't the very latest model - and thanks to the new one, my computer looks so fat that it should probably dress in a velour tracksuit and hang around Gregg's eating pasties.

By changing my computer from iMac to Fat Mac, Apple has ruined my social standing, my personal productivity and my sexual potency.

That's nonsense, of course. My computer hasn't changed a bit: it remains a quad-core screamer with loads of RAM, and it's more than capable of handling anything I care to throw at it. In fact, for most of what I do it's massively, ridiculously oversized and overpowered; even if I had the money, junking it for the new one would be silly.

Moaning that Apple has made my computer obsolete would be ridiculous, yet lots of people are doing exactly the same thing about the new iPad 4. Had Apple stopped supporting the iPad 2 or iPad 3 they might have a point, but Apple hasn't - and the iPad 3 works as well today as it did yesterday. You just can't buy one any more.

The complaint, then, isn't that Apple has killed anyone's iPads; it's that Apple has killed some iPad owners' bragging rights. I'm not sure we should be too concerned about that.

Surviving without Steve

This week's iPad mini event was interesting in all kinds of ways, and not just because of the way Apple tried not to show the new iMac's bulbous bum in its hero shots. What struck me was the confidence: in a single event we saw not one, not two, but five new products: refreshed iPads and Mac Minis, a new MacBook Pro, a new iMac and of course the iPad mini.

Just weeks after unveiling new iPhones and iPods, Apple had so much stuff to show off that Phil Schiller was clearly rushing through some of his presentation to make it all fit.

That's not what's supposed to happen. Now that Apple's well into the post-Steve era, it should be a mess. It should be releasing rubbish, trying to copy every rival, attempting to hit every price point and undoing all of Jobs' good work.

That's not what I saw last night. The new iMac may make my one look fat, but it's a beautiful design; the iPad mini might be nearer the size of a Nexus 7, but its price tag shows that Apple isn't interested in bargain basement battling. The whole event looked like Apple doing what Apple does best: refining, refining and refining some more.

Apple isn't perfect - anyone who used iOS 6's maps to get to the Apple event probably ended up in Norway - but it doesn't appear to be panicking either.