Two things that irk me is: How a barbie or action figure is roughly ~$30, and an iPad is roughly $600. how did kids get to the point where they are asking for

Two things that irk me is: How a barbie or action figure is roughly ~$30, and an iPad is roughly $600. how did kids get to the point where they are asking for something that is 20x what they asked for the year before? Is it hype, marketing, the lost value of a dollar? Maybe it's the get-off-my-lawn part of me, but I see an iPad as a loss to the imagination for a kid, whereas a Barbie requires and hones imagination because it doesn't do all the zany things that an iPad can do. And lastly, iPad have a built-in obsolescence to them. Every time you update to the latest version of iOS, things get slower for your iPad. Barbies and action figures require no updates, and can be handed down over years to other kids.