It's interesting to consider how Apple and NeXT were both nearing collapse in the late 1990s, and yet combining the two resulted, over the next 20 years, in perhaps the most successful tech company of all time.
Apple needed Steve Jobs back then. It needs another Steve Jobs now as well. Under Tim Cook, Apple has been great in terms of stock-market price and profitability, but the company clearly lacks a unifying vision for the future. They've bought themself time, but sooner rather than later, we'll see Apple decline and it won't look good.
The Xerox PARC vision (tabs, pads, boards, gui, mouse, OOP) have largely played out. Smart TVs have not fulfilled the the potential for boards. As an industry, we collectively turned away from the potential of user-modifiable software (Smalltalk, Hypercard).
AI/ML, VR, AR, as far as I know, wasn’t coming out of PARC. I am not sure they have the same kind of mass market appeal … or maybe, we do not have someone like a Steve Jobs that could bring it to the masses.
Just because you don't see any Apple skunkworks VR/AR headsets getting left in a motel room [1] and they don't report how much they are investing in that new product line (rumored to be more in total than Meta's 10B/y) - you should not underestimate the potential for immersive spatial computing to do to the iPhone what the iPhone did to the iPod.
