I think you vastly overrate Apple Engineering. When I see what the PowerMacs used to be like in the eartly-to-mid 2000s (the sheer simplicity of everything and how easy it was to open, upgrade, etc. and now how everything they do is to purposely keep you from even replacing a simple battery or fan yourself while the Apple stores have "geniuses" that can't even change that battery for you (they just mail it into Apple and give you a used replacement IF they have one in stock; otherwise, too bad) and I have to laugh at people's postings that THINK Apple really is run by "geniuses". The genius was Steve Jobs. Everyone else seems to not have a clue what to do since he died.
iOS updates have been buggy as hell. OS X has been all "let's convert to Jony's 'flat' vision" rather than actual solid improvements and they have had huge bugs as well considering there's been very little change under the surface. Metal was supposed to be huge, but all it did was bring the GUI speed back to where Yosemite made it slower than molasses (assuming you have a GPU that supports it). I see massive BLOAT in the operating systems, bugs galore and yet the iPad "Pro" for all its pretense is little more than an updated iPad V1.0 with a stylus added (something Steve HATED). So that's innovation?
Comparing Apple since Mr. Jobs died with Tchaikovsky is a bit like saying Coors Light is the best tasting beer ever made. Only a mass market consumer that's never tasted anything better (or doesn't like the taste of actual beer) would even DARE to suggest such a thing and yet I've seen such suggestions on places like ratebeer.com (despite the irrefutable fact Coors has almost no flavor what-so-ever compared to any non-macro beer). But given Tim Cook has made investors more money (issuing dividends for the first time; something Steve also was against) so I can see how one might compare Apple to Coors Light in terms of profitability, but TASTE? Come on. Apple has been copying its own past hardware designs for some time now and the Apple Watch isn't exactly a must have product.
Oh yeah, there was that "trash can" Mac Pro design a couple of years ago. It removed 100% of the internal upgradability that professionals wanted (and thus many hated it and said so LOUDLY), removed any chance of consumer GPU upgrades by using a custom connector and hasn't been updated since it was introduced. GREAT STUFF APPLE!
The old Mac Pro may have looked like a cheese grater (the PowerMac-era Macs were beautiful by comparison), but at least the INSIDE was first rate, easy to open and upgrade and extremely functional and versatile. The new Mac Pro screams "I have to be different" while offering nothing except to a limited crowd of video editors (while Final Cut Pro X killed most of the actual professional video editing market for Macs by replacing a fully functional program with a veritable new POLISHED TURD).
Jony Ive was a good hardware designer when reigned in by management, but OS X "Yosemite" proved how utterly generic and blind the man is when it comes to software GUIs. Yosemite was a train wreck (and not just the GUI but how bloated and slow it was) and I given the polls on this site, I KNOW I'm not alone in that assessment.
But what you call that quoted wall of text above is what the rest of us call GENERIC (i.e. the flat 2D ugly interface introduced in Yosemite). OS X used to be a thing of beauty. Replacing the Aqua "jeweled" stop-light window buttons that have been there since the first consumer release of OS X with FLAT fills (that even a 5-year old could manage with zero issues in Photoshop) doesn't exactly thrill me and many others let alone motivate us to compare Jony Ive with Tchaikovsky....
One who can read design language properly? Those people must have ... just not much sense at all? Excuse me a moment, I suddenly feel nausea coming on....