As a mechanical engineer working in software, I think both fields have completely different philosophies of product development. In hardware, you give a lot of thought to potential failure modes and contingencies before building something, which takes time. In software, I’ve rarely seen a product whose first version is completely free of bugs. Shipping with some bugs and fixing them through iterations is standard industry practice, whereas it’s less acceptable in hardware.

I think Apple is more of a hardware company than a software company these days. They invested enough time, resources, and patience in ARM for it to now compete with the once-mighty Intel x86 architecture. That kind of progress requires patience, so I don’t think we can simply call Apple a slow company or say it isn’t innovating.