"I get what you’re saying, but I think people underestimate the novelty of Apple’s design decisions on things like the iPhone, declaring them obvious in hindsight."

I'm not saying the iPhone was obvious. I'm saying it wasn't coming after years of failure in the product space. They did a good job and leaped very quickly to a good solution. Absent Apple, the rest of the market would have gotten there, though. They weren't swimming upstream, they just got where the stream was going faster than anyone else by quite a lot.

iPad was swimming upstream. So is a VR headset.