> Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.

Apple doesn't take proven ones of anything. What they do is arrive at something proven from first principles. Everyone else did it faster because they borrowed, but Apple did it from scratch, with all the detail-oriented UX niceties that entails.

This was more prevalent when Jobs was still around. Apple still has some of that philosophy at its core, but it's been eroding over time (for example with "AI" and now Liquid Ass). They still do their own QA, though, and so on. They're not copying the market, they have their own.