Since then, apple has migrated from being a brand focused on the shear love of using technology to essentially any other luxury brand (I disagree with the premise that they aren't still inventors in the engineering sense, but they certainly aren't innovating in the way they had prior).
The closest thing we have today would be something like Alexa, where people young and old can be deeply immersed with a new, and further humanizing, piece of technology. Apple certainly had a head start with Siri, but they were never able to keep up and clearly misunderstood what people are getting out of digital assistants with their homepod since it's too much of a luxury sound product rather than something more utilitarian.
I get that, but they didn’t “invent” the smartphone. They executed an existing concept far better than anybody else had been able to up until then, and the result of that was a complete industry change. It’s great, but they weren’t there when the first smartphones appeared - they came along with a much better implementation of the concept.
I think they’ll continue to do this in other markets as they develop.
What does 'invent' even mean to you, and the others, then?
If Apple didn't do what they did, where would we be?
> I disagree, when apple released the iphone, they changed the face of what smart phones would ultimately become.
It looks like you're actually agreeing: They (Apple) executed on an extant idea (smart phones) so well that they changed the face of the industry (app stores, etc etc).