It's not clear to me that the timing was essential. Apparently Kodak had a policy since 1975 to only sell parts to direct purchasers of equipment, but the initial case wasn't filed until 1988. So the official terms, which were between Kodak and customers, not Kodak and ISOs, hadn't changed recently.
Clearly Kodak was taking some non-official anticompetitive actions, but that's not the same as changing the official terms.
The dissent... of the Supreme Court opinion??
In Kodak, customers originally purchased Kodak copiers without any aftermarket restrictions, and then several years later Kodak changed their policy and stopped selling repair parts to the ISOs, which left customers locked into buying repair services from Kodak instead.
The key factor in Kodak was that there was change to the conditions under which customers could obtain repair parts that customers could not have reasonably anticipated or planned for when they originally purchased Kodak copiers. The fact that a change in policy occurred is very important to that case, and indeed some subsequent courts have found that absent that change in policy, Kodak does not apply.
Epic's lawyer spent the first part of yesterday's hearing attempting to argue that Kodak applied to this case, but judge seemed very skeptical of this line of argument. As Apple's lawyer correctly pointed out, single-brand markets are a unicorn in anti-trust law and this case does not fit the narrow exceptions created by Kodak (and a related case, Newcal).