That's a great point and an easy way to visualize it as an outsider, but it's not necessarily that simple.

For one thing, the iPad (market-leading tablet) and the iPhone (market-leading pocket touchscreen device) were not their first attempt at doing that. That would be the Newton, which was an actual launched product and a commercial failure.

For another thing, even Apple can't just become the market leader by doing nothing. They need to enter late with a good product, and having a good product takes R&D, which takes time. With MP3 players, smartphones, and tablets, they didn't exactly wait until the industry was burnt through before they came in with their offering; they were just later (with the successful product) than some other people who did it worse. They were still doing R&D during those years when they were "waiting."

Apple could still "show up late" to AI in a few more years or a decade, using their current toe-dipping to inform something better, and it would still fit into the picture you have of how they "should've done it." Not to mention, Apple's also lost its way before with things like convoluted product lines (a dozen models of everything) and experimental products (the Newton then, Apple Vision now); messing up for a while also isn't exactly bucking history.

I see your point, but I see nothing to indicate they’re doing the “polish and wait”. No reason to believe they’re cooking behind the scenes or that this product was a learning exercise for them.

Most of their current products seem to be decaying in the dead march towards the next yearly release. ux and ui are becoming more and more poorly thought (see their last design language). They half pursue ideas and don’t manage to deliver (vr, apple car, etc).

I see cargo culting and fad chasing like any average leadership, only with a fatter stack of cash supporting the endeavour.

I guess I'm not necessarily saying they're secretly working on it now, but I'm responding to your "I don't get why they went for the rush" with "it doesn't seem like they really went for the rush" (any more than the Newton was evidence that they "went for the rush" of smartphones or tablets).

We basically know what they are cooking behind the scenes - to write a $1 Billion check to Google for a custom Gemini model

Because today they're racing against regulators for the privilege of setting their own service as the preinstalled, exclusive, default with APIs only they are allowed to use.

They already lost this superpower in the EU and I think Japan, India, Brazil too. Early next year they've got their US antitrust trial, and later in the year are some class actions challenging their control over app distribution, and at least two pieces of draft legislation are circulating that would require allowing competing apps to be defaults.

If they need another two years they might face an entrenched and perhaps even better competitor, while their own app needs to be downloaded from the App Store.

As someone who bought and used various MP3 players before getting an iPod I disagree.

They were not technically first at creating a portable music player that relied on digital compressed format and digital storage, that's true. However before the iPod, you had either very low storage capacity, reliance on expensive memory cards that you would need to swap or hard drive based players that were unpractical to carry around.

Those solutions also had generally terrible user interface that made things like browsing the library or seeking in a track a pain in the ass. It was a moderate improvement on already existing solutions. It wasn't that much better than a MP3 CD player (especially after they figured out buffering to avoid skipping because of movement). I had a mini-disc player in parallel to the MP3s and it was generally a better solution: cheaper for managing a big library and it had compression. Physical media management was still a problem but that was also a requirement for MP3 player of practical size that used memory cards (and those were awfully expensive).

Then Apple came in with a solution using the newer 1,8 inch hard drive format with a starting capacity of 5GB, which would be bumped to 10GB shortly. It changed everything, it was practical in portability/pocketability, storage capacity and user interface. My brother bought an Archos player released around the same time and it was just a joke compared to the iPod (he got it because it was on sale for much cheaper).

So yeah, technically Apple was not the first to commercialize an MP3 player. But they trailed the earliest entrant in the market only by a few years (about 3) and they basically defined the market. Before the iPod, MP3 players were mostly a waste of money and a curiosity at best. The experience they would offer for the price was ridiculous. The iPod was expensive but it was a major improvement in every way, it made the Portable Media Player not only a possibility but something very desirable because it was useful and competent. The iPhone is basically the same story and before that the Mac (for DTP) and even before that the Apple II (for general computing access to individuals).

I feel that when people argue about Apple being late on innovation they are arguing in bad faith to justify current mismanagement (because they make a shit ton of money regardless). But it's basically splitting hairs. Yes Apple was never strictly first on purely technical grounds but they were always the first at creating a consumer product that would actually be able to achieve the purpose it was supposed to in a satisfactory manner.