Apple had the trifecta of three visionary types. Steve Wozniac (pretty much single handedly invented the 80s portable TV computer), Steve Jobs (Didnt invent shit, but had a god-like sense of predicting what consumers would want.) and Jonny Ives (Masterful industrial designer. Love or hate Apples, but the devices that came out under his watch where beautiful).
Jobs should have left the company to Ives.
Please, no. The Mac under Ive was a train wreck of missing functionality. From the lack of floppy drives in the iMac (which was a nightmare in the education market, to the point where ~100% of them ended up with some kind of floppy drive or Zip drive or similar attached externally), to the premature dropping of FireWire (which Apple literally just dropped support for a few weeks ago, but which was phased out on the hardware side from 2008 through 2012), to the premature removal of USB-A ports (which a lot of Mac laptop users still curse to this day), to the premature removal of HDMI ports, SD card slots, and MagSafe (all of which Mac users complained about so much that they actually put them all back).
That's before we even get into human interface issues like the butterfly keyboards, the touch bar, the removal of Touch ID and the home button on the iPhone, etc.
The post-Ive MacBook Pro models are IMO a breath of fresh air pretty much across the board. I'm hoping the iPhone gets there eventually.
Tim Cook is a fine enough businessman, and he seems a decent person (I've yet to hear of him throwing tables at staff members like Jobs did) but the only real innovations to come out under him where watches (which where kind of predicted by everyone, so more just getting in early) and the ARM thing, again less innovation more just smart use of resources.
To be fair, that ARM thing resulted in Macs that run all day without a charge, which is literally the thing more Mac users have asked for than probably any other feature, and have literally been begging for since the PowerBook G4 took away the dual battery bays in 2001.
And remember that the iPhone team wasn't led by Ive. It was led by Forstall, and the hardware team was led by Tony Fadell. That's where bulk of the innovation that made the iPhone a success came from, IMO. This is not to say that Apple should have held on to Forstall, given reports of his personality conflicts with other execs, but I think he should get credit for a lot of the fundamentals of what made the iPhone a success, along with Tony Fadell, who also gets credit for the iPod.
Ive... made a case. It was a beautiful case, where they talked about how they carefully matched each front and back in various ways to ensure that the alignment was perfect, yada, yada, yada, but it was still a case with a glass screen and a port and a headphone jack (that was recessed so badly that no headphones anyone owned could even plug in).
Has Apple lost its innovators? Maybe. Will Apple find new innovators? Probably. Is Apple doing good engineering in the meantime? Definitely.
But nothing that completely blows the market apart. macs look more or less the same as they did a decade ago. IPhones have stagnated because the updates are so incremental. IPads are still IPads. Wheres the new product lines?
They tried to do a self-driving car, but I guess they couldn't pull off the AI. I know they've been doing stuff with drones for Maps imaging purposes since at least 2016, and I'd imagine that tech could eventually turn into a real-world product if they ever decide to productize it. I'm sure there are other skunkworks projects at Apple that could eventually turn into something cool, or at least I hope so, because that's how innovation usually happened at Apple, and presumably still does.
All we've gotten is the bloody VR headset thats too expensive and nobody wants since VR is an intractably flawed technology that causes eye strain and headaches in *most* people. Good fun to toy with occasionally, but not at $3K+
No disagreement. But it's awfully easy to say, "Why haven't you come up with anything new" without actually suggesting something that they should have invented. There's really not a lot new in the consumer electronics space. It's not like somebody else beat them to the punch on much of anything other than AR glasses (and, arguably, EVs, if you consider those to be consumer electronics).