Wouldn't those two be the opposite of fast followers? Indeed, they trailblazed once upon a time. But they maintained that after being surpassed by focusing on being slow followers. Analyzing the market, polishing what worked to perfection, and making it super intuitive.
Or perhaps the time scale of "fast follower" is distorted in my head, compared to the scale of business.
I think as they're quite secretive so it seems they're slow followers but they're fairly fast in starting the project, keep it under wraps and take their time to get it right.
Younger readers might not know that before the iPad came out, Michael Arrington tried to make a tablet before tablets were a thing. So the problem back then was that touch screens were expensive and scaling up from a smart phone to a tablet had a lot of engineering problems. It didn't happen overnight. And Arrington started building TechCrunch’s "CrunchPad" in public, and people thought he might steal a march on tablets. It went a bit wrong with a falling out with a manufacturer, and the manufacturer released the JooJoo.
But obviously Apple had been working on the iPad the entire time, kept their mouths shut until they had perfected it and crushed the JooJoo a couple of months after the JooJoo's release date. The JooJoo was more expensive than expected, almost the same price as the iPad, but had performance issues, poor software, no app store and a short battery life.
You might argue that Apple's lost that 'skill' now. For example, the Apple Vision Pro, which didn't nail it.
The vision is interesting and encapsulates a bit of old and new apple. It's clearly well made and best in class so in some ways they did wait to bring out something, quality, rather than something during the hype.
On the other hand, you can argue that they didn't wait long enough because the tech to really pull off this vision simply wasn't there yet (or is there but is obscenely expensive, which is saying something given this headset was already lambasted for cost). It's marketing (after looking back at some commercials) for what it offers was half "oh this is pretty useful" (a workststion with very little footprint) and half "oh this is black mirror" (lying along on a couch watching movies, interacting with kids as you have a giant headset on you). Maybe it's the nature of thr medium, but Apple tended to do a good job is making it feel like their technology brought people closer. Here the socialization felt hollow.
Apple's acquistion of fingerworks was probably important here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks
> You might argue that Apple's lost that 'skill' now. For example, the Apple Vision Pro, which didn't nail it.
Apple has always liked to dabble with 'failures' too, though. For example, the Newton didn't nail it, but arguably was still an important step towards creating the iPad.