Could you elaborate on your comment? I don't see how your assertion about Jobs (which I personally find tiresome: he's been dead a long while but the company continues to thrive; it's now necessary to start qualifying this argument about Jobs' absence rather than assume it is the argument) ties in with the details of the article. Perhaps you could expand on what you see as 5G's hurdles and how they specifically relate to Apple's product plans.
If by "not innovating" you mean "not introducing new product-categories" then, yes, Apple isn't innovating. However, in the past few years Apple has:
- made fingerprint scanning fast and easy to use (and then removed it)
- pioneered facial recognition that is robust against being fooled by images and masks, and also robust to the user's face slowly changing (e.g. growing a beard)
- created their own SoC that allows for solid security, excellent power management, and fast graphics
- made security a feature
- pioneered augmented reality with ARKit
- pioneered watch-based EKG
- pioneered watch-based insulin measurements (apparently the research didn't work out, though)
- researching self-driving cars (rumor has it)
- pioneered fake bokeh with a phone camera
- maintains net profit margins of 40% (!! even Coca-Cola is only around 30%; margins of this sort are not easy to maintain for multiple years)
You could argue that Apple is not the first to do many of those, but it wasn't the first to make a phone-computer, nor was it the first to make watch-computer, yet that counted as innovating. So I don't think it would be fair to say that security, SoC, AR, self-driving cars (allegedly) is not innovating. It's just that the innovations aren't category-defining like they used to be. But category-defining innovations aren't a dime a dozen. And we don't know if Steve Jobs could have continued creating category-defining products, either.
The "Apple doesn't innovate" chestnut has been with us since long before Steve died, and it's as ridiculous now as then. It's the classic debate between evolution and revolution.
Apple quietly but incessantly evolves their products so that today's major new features are added to tomorrow's minor backlog of expected features. We quickly forget how amazing something is because we rapidly move from the "ooh ahh" phase to the "meh" phase thanks to the relentless, predictable pace of evolution. Every year, something replaces the new and shiny thing from last year, and the world somehow manages to forget from what we've come to what we've come in short, measurable periods of time — a year, two years, five years, a decade…
Meanwhile, Apple brings out the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, and it's somehow expected that they'll do similar revolutionary shake-ups every few years because that, apparently, is their modus operandi. Plenty of digital ink has been spilled already to say that no, this is not the way Apple does things. The iPhone, the iPad, and to a lesser extent (but with no less validity) the Apple Watch have vastly changed the technological landscape to be sure, but it's the slow, quiet evolutions on top of the noisy revolutions that truly show what innovation can do.
Innovation isn't just inventing new product categories. Innovation can be taking something that already exists and making it better. It can be making something more accessible, more friendly, from beyond the grasp of the technological elite and into the hands of mere mortals. It's making things smaller, faster, and more convenient. It's evolving what we already know into what we'll soon come to expect.
Since Steve died, we've had massive improvements to the way macOS and iOS communicate to get jobs done quicker and more efficiently, with less hassle when switching devices in a modern mobile lifestyle; seen tremendous changes in the way people think about health and fitness with Apple Watch, as well as the fundamental means of communication; seen how Apple conglomerates content from multiple providers to deliver a more seamless experience for browsing TV shows and movies on Apple TV and iOS to delivering the news in a fun, friendly way, and most recently seen how profesionals can use the iPad, leveraging the simplicity of iOS with powerful custom processors whilst not having to deal with the complexity of a desktop OS nor the battery drainage of Intel's silicon; made foolproof facial recognition not only widely available but, once the iPhone 7 and 8 stop selling, the standard (that plenty of competitors try, and fail, to emulate). There's a lot more I could write but so little time.
If I sound like an advertisement, it's because I'm trying to impress upon you that I haven't even begun to list the fields in which Apple has innovated since Steve died, but the accomplishments so far have been enormous enough that if tomorrow the world suddenly reverted to what was available at the end of 2011, much of the world would sorely feel it.
And to add to this, it can be said that what Apple does today, the rest of the industry does tomorrow. All of those tiny evolutions seem to be mirrored in Android, Windows, Linux, and other systems taking their queues from iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Apple does the same thing, as any company does, taking what's successful but adding their own spin on it to to adopt, to evolve, to innovate.
As Phil Schiller put it, "Can't innovate anymore, my ass!".
