Well, I think Jony Ive once designed a table and a Christmas Tree, if memory serves me correctly.
Apple's product vision is based on making technology more relevant and personal. The company believes that technology is inherently too powerful and complex. Accordingly, in order for people to get the most out of technology, another ingredient is required: design. By focusing on how people actually use technology, Apple approaches technology very differently than any other company approaches it, and it often shows in the unorthodox design underpinning many of their products, right down to the apple mouse with the charging port located on the underside, or the atypical charging method of the first-gen Apple Pencil.
This is the duality facing Apple. They create experiences using their control over hardware, software and services (all of which revolve around technology), yet in their eyes, technology is also the enemy. People don't seem to realize that simplicity is far harder than complexity. It's easy to add in a million buttons, toggles, switches, and features. What's hard is doing that in a dead-simple manner that is logical, coherent, and easy to use.
As to your last point, yes, Apple may have started with computers, but using the theory of "The Grand Unified Theory of Apple Products", it's pretty obvious why Apple has gone down the path they did. PCs were just the start and the means, never the end.
http://fortune.com/2015/12/04/schiller-apple-theory/
- “The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often.”
- “The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that.”
- “The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook. Like, why do I need a notebook? I can add a keyboard! I can do all these things!””
- “The job of the notebook is to make it so you never need a desktop, right? It’s been doing this for a decade.”
- “[The job of the Mac] is to challenge what we think a computer can do, and do things that no computer has ever done before—[it should] be more and more powerful and capable so that we need a desktop because of its capabilities.”
And the natural successor to the watch and the phone is glasses, not a bigger phone. And this is why when I see so many people trumpeting the Galaxy Fold in the other thread and holding it up as proof that Apple is no longer innovating, I can't help but roll my eyes. And that is why I can safely and confidently say that Apple will very likely not do a folding phone, and that Samsung is betting on all the wrong horses.
That's why so many techies continue to be baffled by Apple's success. People with an engineering mindset don't understand design, and so when they see Apple's incredible success, they just can't wrap their brains around the fact that it's good design that leads to this success. So instead, they convince themselves that Apple only makes money because they're a cult that brainwashes millions of people through product marketing. That's the only way that people who don't understand design are able to make sense of things.
