Your exemples are not very good.
Nintendo has always been an innovative company. They have gone against the rest of the industry time and time again. What they don’t do is follow. They don’t go for ever increasing performance. They don’t chase ports. The Wii with motion control, the switch merging handheld and tv based, both were very new idea.
Respectfully, I think you missed the point of GP, as you are agreeing with them.
Being a technology follower is 100% compatible with being a user experience innovator.
Like you said, Nintendo saw that consumers didn’t really want more polygons/second, they wanted fun. Similarly, Apple saw Rio and other MP3 players and realized that consumers didn’t want a 800 128kbps mp3s in their pocket, they wanted a stylish way to listen to music on the go.
Sure, the Wii controllers and iPod clickwheel were novel and innovative user experiences and big hits, but they weren’t heavy lifting technically.
> Being a technology follower is 100% compatible with being a user experience innovator.
I think you are making the same mistake that OP.
You think R&D in the video game industry is releasing more powerful systems. It’s not. R&D is proposing innovative value proposition. Nintendo does that all the time from the Switch to the weird game with cardboard. Nintendo does a lot of R&D in an industry where their competitors do very little and mostly just update their existing product. Calling them an exemple of a follower couldn’t be further from the truth.
Apple indeed used to do a lot of R&D. They do a lot less nowadays.