In the same fashion that microsoft and ibm thrives: its lost its dominance in the consumer market “headspace”, printing money but no longer being a company worth knowing. Its just another BigCo at this point, with all the benefits and dullness associated with it. (Eg it’s difficult to be excited for apple product announcements; they have a money-printing operation and their only intent is to maintain it as-is; naturally any updates will be rather mundane, safe iterations on the running system)

In other words, apple became boring, or at least has been boring for a while now.

I mean, the whole computer market is boring (tablets, phones, laptops, etc; all the same shit YoY), but its kind of hard to think that current-apple is going to break that trend, in the same way you wouldn't expect IBM or Xerox to. Don't know of any startups doing anything terribly interesting in the space, with any real chance of success.

Hell, at this point Microsoft might be the likeliest candidate: at least they're doing something with stuff like stupidly big conference room screens and maybe Hololens will do something cool.