Can you flesh out an argument that Cook and/or Apple is "running out of time"?
On the other hand, even with no more hits, they do still have incredible customer loyalty and a massively profitable product line. And a lot of people have predicted Apple's doom over the years, only to be proven wrong later. Betting on Apple for the next 5 years seems safe. I wouldn't bet on Apple for the next 20 years right now though.
It's also a narrative problem. Apple has the narrative going - Jobs is gone, can Cook really replace him? Google is mostly boring crickets as far as management narratives.
Say what now? Perhaps you do not remember that most free email providers had a 2 or 4 MB mailbox limit and you had to delete emails as soon as you read them. When I signed up, Google was offering a whooping 1 gigabyte of storage - an improvement of 3 orders of magnitude. Gmail allowed attachments of up to 25MB which only served to make Hotmail's 4MB mailbox look absurd.
Other email providers (free and paid) struggled with spam filtering (and still do). GMails spam filters are magic, as far as I'm concerned - I never get spam and I also don't even bother checking my spam folder for false positives.
These 2 innovations alone can't be "moderate" by any stretch of the imagination.
It's not like email or webmail didn't exist before GMail, but I suppose you could argue that the revolutionary at the time use of AJAX plus gigabyte standard storage space, plus great spam filters was enough to transform webmail from a handicapped second-class citizen to something that tech experts would be happy to leave desktop email clients for.
But then, Google Maps was better than the competition, but enough better to be a revolutionary difference? I'd say no. But where do you draw the line between a good refinement of a pre-existing class of application to something that qualifies as revolutionary?
When Google announced turn-by-turn navigation in maps, Garmin's stock price took a tumble. Also, Street View hadn't ever been done before, surely that qualifies?
Working on the watch means that they aren't working on the Mac or the iPad. They are a victim of their own success in that a successful, well thought out, and profitable product like the watch is viewed as a neutral.
They've also flopped on the TV.
That said, their ability to execute is amazing.
If Cook can't deliver that, he's running out of time.
You do know that all 3 share the same basic OS and technologies (kernel, filesystems, basic services, lots of UI and helper code, etc) just in differently tuned versions with a different "facade" on top, right?
Or that that they have different teams on each of these devices for everything that's not shared, teams that don't even communicate with each other...
I love the products. I probably have $15k of Apple hear in my home. But I'm not buying my kid a 3 year old computer to go off to college with at a premium price.
Because the Air and MBP want to phase out in favor of MBPr and Macbook (plain) and they've been waiting on Intel to deliver anything significant to warrant a new product line for ages. (Intel Skylake CPUs in form factors and energy consumption compatible with the MBPr line have been TBD until recently --some still are--, and in limited production yields still. And previous generation didn't even give any performance speed bump of 2 and 3 generations behind MBPr CPU, and in some cases, worse). In the cases where Intel delivered, Apple did too (e.g. Skylake iMac and Macbook).
The Mac Pro has a similar story (and isn't their first priority or biggest seller anyway).
That said, not sure about any "multi-year gaps" regarding the iPad. The iPad Pro 9.7 came out in March, and the iPad Mini 4 less than a year ago, on September.