Good lord. I’ve been hearing this since the mid 90s. Hell, in 2006 people were complaining that Apple wasn’t doing anything innovative. Yeah, they just switched over to Intel and iPods were leveling out. The ‘Apple is stale’ folks, for all of their self-belief that they could see the future couldn’t even imagine the iPhone, and they derided it when it arrived.

Apple’s problem now is that they own the tech industry as we consider it now — a huge fraction of the profits to be captured from tech go to Apple. Google and Facebook are still ad revenue businesses that aredriven by tech and Amazon is still a retail business driven by tech. In order for Apple to continue their growth they need to move into other industries — transportation, energy, health care, defense, etc.

Many Mac pundits thought the iPod would destroy Apple, distracting them from their core area of innovation — the PC. The iPhone just added to that fear. Yet the Mac has never been stronger or more popular. Now the iPhone pundits will fear the Watch or the Car or whatever new sector Apple goes into. This is an old song.

Apple won’t mind losing some iPhone sales if it nets them a car industry. That doesn’t mean they aren’t innovative, it just means you don’t think they’re paying enough attention to your personal wants. That’s not a failing of Apple but a failed expectation of what to expect from a mulitnational corporation. Google has disappointed countless loyal users by discontinuing key services and by abandoning markets that were important to them. But top-of-the-heap Apple is clearly less interested in what the lock screen says about their ability to innovate and more interested in whether they can pull off a societal change to autonomous EVs, or clean energy, or improved healthcare. Apple’s ambitions now are closer to government in terms of reach. After all, they can afford to spend like one to achieve this stuff.