When VR has proven itself, with R&D investments of other companies, Apple will release a near-perfect refinement of all things VR and everyone will hail them as the savior who brought VR to the world.
Is that not innovation? Maybe technically the iPhone was just a combination of existing technologies, but it went above and beyond them to the point that it was essentially new.
None of this is to say they don't have brilliant hardware engineers working on things all the time. But the boldest moves Apple in the past decade and a half have come from strategic M&As.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Yes but not at the same level of complexity. The processor, electronics, battery technology and manufacturing processes require multi-decade spanning consistent efforts, iterations and investments to make it happen.
Once the difficult part is done. What remains now is building a end user product. Which has its own complexities. But once the hard part is done, the other parts are relatively easy.
There's no real reason for Apple to get into VR yet. They can make a deal with Oculus / Valve / Sony and have a decent VR product supported on Mac in under 6 months.
Everyone, whether it's on top of love, hate or indifference, wants to comment on Apple. That's how you know you've won (the money probably doesn't hurt either).