Find some other definition for 'innovation' than just further slimming and removal of ports.
A little extra thickness would enable bigger batteries in mobile products, as well as construction methods that allow opening with a screwdriver rather than a heat gun.
Apple obviously called it right with the removal of certain features in the past (floppy drives, ADB, SCSI, optical drives), but they draw from this well a bit too often for inspiration. They're now getting rid of ports that are still in regular, mainstream use! Like USB3 A, SD cards, HDMI, Ethernet and MagSafe. They're desperate to maintain their futuristic image, essentially putting marketing priorities ahead of customer convenience. I would offer a mea culpa and bring all these back, but that's hardly Apple's way. They'll just stick to their guns and tough it out for the next 10 years, until USB A and HDMI disappear.
As much as I love the look of aluminium, one universal issue with Apple's products is how they're designed for showroom appeal but scratch so easily in real life. Part of me appreciates the tough practicality of ThinkPads' rubbery coatings. An area I would investigate.
It would be nice to see greater whimsy in Apple designs. The early 2000s had so many classics, yet almost everything now is just an aluminium rectangle with rounded corners. The 'trash can' Mac Pro was actually pretty cool in this regard - it certainly projected a sleek futuristic feel. This generation's G4 Cube - I'll certainly buy one one day as a collector's piece, once they're cheap on eBay.
The Mac Pro is a tricky one. They were clearly intending to kill it off and replace it with the iMac Pro, until they had a change of heart for some reason. Presumably they'll keep the iMP around when the new MP comes out, but it's hard to see why high end users would buy one, unless the new MP is even more expensive. Personally, I would like to see an Apple desktop more akin to the old G4 towers (surprise surprise!). They were a good size, and had nice accessibility (just rubbish airflow!). The handles were practical too.
Apple have always refused to make the equivalent of a regular PC, with a desktop processor and a double-slot GPU. Presumably because it would destroy the iMac in benchmarks and take a big chunk of sales away from the already low-selling Mac Pro. This is the sort of thing you can get away with when you own the platform. But it means Apple studiously ignores the PC price / performance sweet-spot, as if it doesn't exist, only selling computers based on laptop or workstation parts. Sure, I would be tempted to do the same if I were them, but it typifies why many are put off the Mac platform.
P.S. I wouldn't go back to PPC - I'm not romantic about particular instruction sets and PPC's ship has sailed. AFAIK it has very little impact on performance / efficiency these days. I think even x86 CPUs are essentially RISC at their core, and half the transistors in CPUs are cache anyway. I would certainly consider AMD though - a Mac Pro supporting up to 64 threads would be pretty crazy!
