Put another way - if you can reliably pick the next Apple before anyone else, you should go work in finance and make tons of money.
Problem is that it might take years to verify that.
> The key is that
That doesn't change the fact that there are plenty (in absolute numbers) of individual investors who consistently beat the market. Whether that's because of luck or something else is rather hard to tell.
It's actually not very hard to tell; if it was because of something other than luck, you'd expect that beating the market in the past would have some predictive value of their ability to beat the market in the future.