> My suspicion is that Apple / Tim Cook knows something BIG that we don't that they are going to get PERFECT while they still have the cash fire hose of the iPhone to drive the engine.

Possible --- but it seems to me much more likely that Apple is just another big company suffering from the classic combination of innovator's dilemma and big company internal politics. What special immunity would Apple have to the problems that bring down every big tech company in its old age?

Tech companies are like people. They get old. If they don't die suddenly, they eventually succumb to general systems frailty and self-aggrandizing cancers. Sure, Apple might be one of those rare 80 year old marathon runners, but why would you expect it to be?

As everybody knows, Apple's major innovations happened on well known product categories that other companies had not properly looked at. Apple took the existing ideas, figured out the most important features and executed extremely well.

Maybe the world has changed and such opportunities no longer exist. There's more VC money available and more large IT companies pursuing various opportunities. It might be that we simply don't have such overlooked categories any more. Even if they do exist, everybody is watching Apple so closely that it is not likely they could build something major in secret.

Apple should absolutely be investing big into future product categories, as they have done in the past.

However, with revenue and profit levels where they are, it's baffling to see them seem to devote less resources in an absolute sense (not just a proportional one) to existing money-makers. Mac laptops are big sellers. iPhones are big sellers. Yet the refreshes get more and more basic, and the software quality seems to be sliding downward. Could they really not fix this without sacrificing future investment? They did it in the past when they had less money to play with, after all...

They have invested in future product categories, the Apple Watch being the most recent - and not very successful - example.

I'm afraid what Apple is doing is purely looking at figures - if it doesn't sell at least X or account for Y% of revenue, it's discarded. AirPort, gone, displays, gone, 17 inch MBP, long gone.

And yet their R&D budget is still going up (http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2016/05/Apple-RD-Spendi...), estimated to become $12 billion in 2017. IDK where it all goes though.

It's going to the car.

AR is still a category without an elegant 'Apple' solution, to its detriment. As they did with smartphones when the technology was at a place to support such a game changing device I could see them defining/kickstarting the AR category when mobile processors can handle it.

> My suspicion is that Apple / Tim Cook knows something BIG

That's what everyone has been hoping for years. That's why I was hung up to the last keynote, up to the last second, hoping for Tim Cook to say "One more thing", and launch a new product line. And the one more thing was, no kidding, Lady Gaga. And everyone is now despairing that there is anything to wait for.

At least we have the emoji bar on the keyboard now.

Isn't one of the theories that the "something BIG" is Apple becoming a payment processor/bank/whatever financial entity, supported by the presence of a fingerprint reader & secure enclave in all their mobile devices (including laptops courtesy of the Touch Bar)?

That won't work very well if nobody is buying those devices due to the lack of real updates.