It's no coincidence that so many phones are adopting the notch right after Apple, like so many other design trends.

One of the factors is that Apple forces shifts before the mainstream is ready. But they can get away with it because they’re Apple. This was the case before the iPhone BTW with floppy drive factors and the like. Once Apple blesses, others feel authorized to tag along.

Not saying the notch is the same thing but 3.5mm jack certainly is.

Floppy Drive

USB Only

No CD/DVD drive

It's almost as if they can spot an emerging trend quite well (the move away from floppy disks, the ubiquity of USB and downloading software, music and video rather than buying physical media)

It’s not so much spotting trends. I’d argue all of those were obvious by the time Apple took definitive action. The difference is that most other vendors tend to leave in legacy connectors and media for the time period when pulling them out will lead to outrage in forums such as this one.

Well Firewire was a fail. It was great in term of tech but it never caught on outside of Sony and Apple products(both contributes to the standard)

WiFi

What would be of the industry if they decided to stick with their plans to go with Copland.

Apple doesn't invent anything. They let someone else invent it, then they just borrow the design and iterate. It's been their MO for more than a decade.

Getting close to two decades, at a minimum. It depends on whether you want to go farther back than the iPod (2001).

Obviously, it works for them. An important, if sometimes overlooked, factor of their strategy is that it's not just borrow and iterate, it's a) identify device that will blow up, b) borrow well before it blows up, c) use that lead time to iterate and leap-frog the competition in polish, and d) release right as the market is poised to accept the new device as mainstream.

They can also misjudge any one of those items a bit and still power their way through, especially now that they have such credibility.

If I go back to the mid-90's, Amiga and Atari were much more relevant to my region than Apple, which was mostly visible on American computer magazines.

Had they not been bought by NeXT (which is what actually happened) and we wouldn't be talking about Apple setting industry designs.

Apple's acquisition of NeXT was probably the most expensive - but definitely the most lucrative - acquihire in history.

Release time from concept is probably ~4 years. Factories might start to be able to build notched screens earlier. There is a chance that other vendors just got an access to early version of notched screens technology.