Apple do work on a pretty leisurely timeline.
What do we know about the future? Almost nothing, but we do know online services will have a bigger role to play. If you're worried about Apple's future, worry about their presence in services.
iWork on the web is pretty impressive, and it shows that Apple's application development talent can move well to the web (in fairness, all of their consumer web applications are top class). Still, online services are about so much more than web applications. It requires a different kind of thinking, and often requires targeting multiple platforms.
Maps, Siri, iTunes in the Cloud and iMessage are Apple's only real "services".
Maps have improved, but they're still nowhere near good enough. Personally, I'm shocked how slowly it's improved; I still see huge mistakes (like important central London hospitals being misplaced or mislabelled) and I'm not getting the kind of experience I expected at this stage. I at least expected flyover support for the capitals of Europe, but at a quick glance I see that Amsterdam, Brussels and Edinburgh are all flat.
Siri just plain isn't good enough right now. Speech recognition is a long way behind Google Now in terms of speed and accuracy. Google's knowledge graph has more information about more things, and is improving quickly.
Google are doing impressive things with neural networks which are just ideal for these kinds of tasks. You will never get one algorithm to be a good assistant to large numbers of people; you need a personalised and learning algorithm. This is the kind of thing Google are doing now with Google+ photo corrections and selections, an they grow from it to try bigger things (like the new, ultra-personalised Google Maps). I haven't seen anything from Apple that suggests they can raise their game to this level, which is a shame because it's clear this the future of the sorts of online services they care about.
iTunes Match does its job reasonably well; I use it all the time to stream music and I have no complaints. iTunes Radio looks nice, and it could yet be groundbreaking because of the huge exposure it will get inside the Music App. That's potentially huge: new iPhone buyers will be able to play music out-of-the-box, and that gives them a huge lead over guys like Pandora or Spotify (and Youtube, I should add).
My mother only occasionally listens to music. Not enough to register or pay for something like Spotify. But I'm almost certain she will discover and use iTunes Radio, and it may even get her listening to (and buying) more music.
iMessage needs a web interface. Possibly with HTML5 web notifications so that Windows (and even Android) users get a usable enough iMessage experience.
What that would do is help develop the service in to something people depend on. The best experience will be on iOS, the same way Android has the best Gmail experience. Real-time chat is something that could be a real traffic-puller, so it could also be a springboard for other services, too.
On top of that, Apple need to deliver some kind of very innovative, new type of service. No idea what it could be, but something to give their services that extra push.
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It's one hell of a tough job. I do hope they're investing heavily in this area.
