Apple Pencil. Airpods. Plenty of new and innovative stuff coming from Apple these days. Something my credit card was all too intimately familiar with last year.
I'll give you the AirPods, that was the only thing that piqued my interest at the last September/Fall event. The Apple Pencil, is good but an accessory that can only be fully utilized with the iPad Pro (if it was compatible with earlier iPads I would cede the point but what percentage are iPad Pros, and how many are using the pencil?). Both the Apple Pencil and AirPods product launches were botched. Both had significant "shortages" while the AirPods were delayed nearly two months after Tim said "late October".
Both of these are accessories-granted the airpods aren't restricted to use inside Apples Ecosystem apart from taking advantage of the iCloud automatic syncing feature.
I don't expect Apple to come out with a breakthrough invention or creation every 9-18 months, as much as I expect them to keep current with the competition across all their product lines, desktop, notebook, tablet, phones, watch, and all else under the portfolio. The MacBook Air (reasonably so) is essentially dead with the new MacBook, where Apple filled the void, there is no such filler for a workstation class desktop or low end desktop. Even Apple backed display "solution" is sub par and has been pulled from shelves. (Sorry for the tangent here), but many were clamoring it was good enough, Apple and LG worked together on this thing-it's great... here we are less than two months of it being on the market for it to be pulled from shelves because of an engineering/manufacturing failure to properly shield the thing. Again a void created by apple's neglect only to be left void by partering with an inferior display manufacturer (remember all those LG retina displays that were failing and having ghosting issues in the original retina MacBook Pro circa mid 2012.)
So I pose the argument, apart from incremental improvements what has Apple done, other than preach courage? There computer lines are lingering (which has been pointed out through much of the forum, posting the "buyers guide" as indisputable evidence that they are way off cycle). A new MacBook Pro, even without arguing the port issue, was a critical blow to battery life, even so much as to save face Apple had to remove the energy left estimation, with a touch bar that by many accounts is still nothing to get too excited about. When we enter the mobile and phone space there are incremental updates, enough to keep up with the competition, but nothing putting them ahead of the competition.
I further ask what is Apple to do? They are no longer seen by the consumer youth as "cool" and often there products are low on the "what would you want/buy" in surveys and polls. The veteran crowd is feeling neglected (and rightfully so) and are lookong into alternatives (seriously
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3168...c-to-pc-part-1-whats-driving-me-to-do-it.html). So what does that leave? Those still at the kool aid? The Beats 1 entourage? The the watch band collector aficionados?
I was sincerely impressed with the AirPods, I was at my local Apple store launch day, only to be turned away, but lucky enough to snag one of the Best Buy stock drops before Christmas, the Apple Pencil is a great accessory for a limited percentage of iPads. Here's honestly hoping for something new other than a few different color strips of wrist rubber come this spring.
