[dredmorbius]

Also, to be clear, I'm not accusing Apple of failing to innovate elsewhere in its product chain. It clearly has. Since 1999: the iBook, MacBook Pro, Air, and a few iterations of the iMac, just in form factors. There's been a lot of under-the-hood stuff going on as well.

But where the user interacts with the system, things have been remarkably stable. Even the relatively minor changes which have been presented have been covered with the usual Apple levels of obsession -- skewmorphic vs. flat designs, etc., ad nauseum.

Again the point being: screw with how things are visually and how users interact with the system, you're going to create huge usability costs with little to show for.