Expecting watches to change every couple of years in the name of "fashion" is not understanding watches. Fashionable watch lines often don't notably change in decades. If you look at an Omega Speedmaster from 1957 and compare it to one from today, do you see many differences? Fashion doesn't mean it changes every year, like all things culture, it's an interplay between continuity, movements and countermovements.
If you go on the vogue website right now and click on the fashion tab, you'll see an article about how 35-years-old looks from princess Diana are inspiring todays looks. Continuity like that is especially true in watches. Just look at the Hodinkee article on the best dress watches of 2023:
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-best-dress-watches-of-2023:
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-best-dress-watches-of-2023 and see how many of them look more alike their predecessor than the Apple Watch does.
As for the so-called lack of innovation, that's pretty normal. innovation follows a log curve, fast at first, slower once you run into constraints. Given the very small dimensions of the watch, you run into those constraints fast and hard. If anything, I think it's admirable how they've continued adding features in the last five years:
series 5:compass and always-on display; series 6: blood oxygen monitor, ultra-wideband, altimeter; series 7: brighter, faster charging, improved dust-resisantce, rounder design and almost 20% bigger display; series 8: temperature sensor, car crash detection with new accelerometers and gyros; series 9: double brightness, 78% reduction in carbon emissions from production (yes, that's an amazing feature year-over-year).
Only the series 7 and the series 9 could be argued to be less innovative from the consumer's point of view, but they both clearly represent huge innovations on the production side of things (the changes to the case in the 7, the carbon footprint of the 9 (yes, "carbon neutral" is bogus, 78% reduction is not).
