It was never really all that innovative a company. What Apple has excelled at in the past is making an idea really polished and well-integrated into the Apple ecosystem in ways that feel a lot more natural than most other implementations, to the point that it comes off as innovative - even if it's a feature everyone else has too.

The iPhone, for example, wasn't the only smartphone around when it released, and not even the most capable one. It was missing a ton of features BlackBerry had. Heck, it wasn't even the first touchscreen phone - that would be the IBM Simon, which came out in 1992.

But what the iPhone did was put it all into an attractive package that worked really well with Apple's services.

So I don't think the fact that they're following on LLM development instead of leading will necessarily mean Apple's version won't end up in the lead.

(Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple fan at all and think LLMs are a terrible idea for most implementations they're being put towards.)