When you're that big, you're allowed to make mistakes without major damage. Microsoft did it for ages. Remember Zune?

But it also means that any strategic maneuver is market-changing. Steve Jobs had the intuition and deep read of what people really wanted rather than what they said they want. There is no Steve Jobs any more. People are trend-following and mania-following. The problem is that the people moving tech also have no vision. They have a solution desperately seeking a problem.

And in doing so, the early winners are sociopaths and scam artists who destroy jobs and rewrite code overnight with no guardrails for the product/reputation damage or who just spam and spearphish. Move fast and break things. "We'll patch that later"

As for Apple, along with there are many alternative paths. One that worked is revitalizing the dead tablet market by "doing it a lot better" and making it part of their ecosystem. We'll see how glasses and autos work out, or don't work out. AI is immature for a company that prides itself on "doing things right". Some situations have no room for gaffes. Your guess is as good as mine.

"Now, for something completely different?" That's the 64 billion dollar question.