Isn't this also kind of what Apple has become in the post-Steve Jobs era?
Cook is not a product leader cut from the same cloth as Steve (I mean... few are). His talent was always for supply side management. This is really significant. To secure components and manufacturing capacity for Apple's scale is no mean feat.
I would say 2 significant things have happened on Cook's watch though:
1. The Apple Watch. This certainly hasn't had the impact the iPhone had. It was also launched as a luxury product (remember the ex-Burberry CEO who drove this? The $10,000 Apple Watch edition?). It later got rebranded as a health product and there I think it has potential. The latest version can do ECGs and determine blood oxygen. IMHO there's a massive future market in passive health monitoring.
It's still a somewhat awkward user experience however in a way that never would've happened on Steve's watch. Apple's reputation for polished user experience as a whole is degrading and we may eventually get to the point of Bill Gates's legendary rant [1].
Steve also pushed back against Johnny Ives' hardline pure vision and I doubt the butterfly keyboard fiasco would've happened under Steve.
The second innovation is on the silicon front. There are two prongs to this:
1. Replacing Intel with ARM (M1); and
2. Breaking Qualcomm's "monopoly" on wireless broadband chipsets. This is still ongoing.
Apple still has a lot of inertia from Steve even after all these years. Who knows how long that will last.
[1]: https://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an...
iPhone success has its own problem. You can no longer put leading edge technology into it, because these tech dont scale to hundred million of unit per year. That is why you always see Apple being late to many tech. The only way to do that, or to help doing that, is to have a product that are sold in lower volume, higher margin, and allow them to test and innovate. Both Apple Watch and iPhone Pro ( or iPhone X ) were that. Apple Watch allowed their supply chain to test and improve OLED, LTPO, playing around with material such as ceramics, stainless steel, titanium alloy ( coming soon to iPhone Pro ), SiP ( System in Package ), Double Side Packaging, New Battery packaging, Low Power Bluetooth and WiFi and lots of other small details. They allow Apple to refine the process before they are put on iPhone, or in many cases never actually arrive on an iPhone.
The development line of the A CPUs that led to the M1 is definitely not ‘a new bottle every 1-2 years’. The M1 out-innovated Intel, Qualcomm and to a lesser extend AMD.
Apple also branched out to other categories with the Apple Watch and AirPods.
Apple is most definitely still innovating.
When I started in computing most major players had their own CPU's, and over time everything converged on mostly Intel with AMD/ARM in there to mix it up. Now we see companies swinging back to the old days where each will have their own CPU's. To me its a return to vertical integration and exposes all of us to a new era of lock-in.
Okay. And? You still need innovation to make something like the M1.
However, I'd argue the CPU change is considered a black box vertical improvement by the vast majority of end users. It's a big innovation, but it's still just an improvement to an existing product. And AirPods aren't really groundbreaking.
Apple Watch counts, but is also just a nicer version of something available to people for almost a decade, whereas the iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, and early Macintoshes really offered something very different from anything else you could reasonably get at the time.
A modern equivalent would be, say, "just works" AR glasses, or something no one even knew they might want (faster horses vs. cars, etc.). It's a lot to ask for, but that is the reputation they're trying to maintain, and they are worth over $2 trillion.