People have a tendency to only equate the word “innovation” with “woooaahh, completely new in my face never before seen tech that seemingly came out of nowhere!”. When in reality innovation is almost always slow, small, incremental steps.

So when Apple introduces something to their lineup, many deride it as not being innovative, even though it is often the first version of something that is fairly solid, reliable, and useable.

People think they want mind-blowing technological jumps, but in practice they rarely accept/adopt new technology (or really, anything too outside of the norm, tech or not).

Pretty sure Apple Watch was already in progress when Steve was alive.

Apple just wait until something already exists and then make a more expensive version of it that's not innovation. I'm not saying that something like the vision pro isn't a good product but it's not groundbreaking in any way.

As demonstrated by the fact that Apple made it without any real idea of what it was actually for. It's a VR AR headset that no one wants. Actually no one wants a VR AR hybrid headset they want to be able to play games, the one thing that's terrible at because it doesn't have a controller.