IMO, this demonstrates Apple's lack of ideas now. Bigger/faster iPhones, smaller iPads, different colors, and now keyboards.
No more "Wow! I never even thought of that before" ideas, which is kind of sad.
I really don't think that Apple was ever about that.
What Apple is good at is looking at an existing product and making it more accessible to the average user. Or taking some technology that is, at the time, experimental, or not deemed "serious", but making widespread use of it.
In doing so they may simplify things or make design decisions that are, at the time, surprising, but they have a knack for determining what users REALLY want (even if they aren't asking for it at the time).
Examples:
- personal computers existed before the Apple I/II. Steve's goal was to make one simpler and cheaper and profitable to him by opening up the market to ordinary people. People soon realized that you didn't need to be a hacker with a soldering iron or a scientist/engineer to play with a home computer.
- windowing interfaces existed before the Macintosh. Apple went "all in" with this interface baked right into the core of the computer instead of making it an option sitting on top of a command-line layer, like most others at the time (even until 1995, Windows was an optional UI layer that sat on top of DOS.) People soon realized that a mouse was not a toy and an all-GUI interface could work.
- MP3 players (both flash based and HD based) existed before the iPod. Apple packaged its solution up in a nicer UI, engineered it for compact size and best-in-class battery life, and integrated it with friendly software. MP3s went from being a thing that hackers and geeks (and music pirates) played with to something for the every day music listener.
- Apple also opened up a market to buy digital music, removing the stigma that people listening to digital music were all thieves and pirates who traded songs illegally.
- smartphones existed before the iPhone. They were experimenting with touch interfaces but most thought you still needed the legacy keyboard to be useful. Some PDAs were already using all-touch interfaces (Palm). Apple went "all in" on the touch-only interface and people eventually realized that the keyboard was not in fact necessary. Smartphones became viable for the every day user rather than just for business executives.
- tablets existed before the iPad, but most thought you needed a full desktop OS and were trying to shove in an entire Windows laptop into a portable form factor. Apple went "all in" with the mobile interface and people soon realized that it was possible to get by without a full desktop OS, and buy a tablet for surfing instead of a netbook or full PC.
- Apple didn't invent the digital assistant, but they took Siri and made it available to millions of people, long before most of us thought the state of AI was ready for that sort of thing.
And so on...