That's not relevant. Apple is one of the worlds most valuable company, and they're stagnating. They've been hitting home-runs with products before, and creating new markets.
Watch, even if it ends up eating the whole current market, but not creating new one, is a failure by Apple standards. Unless Apple is going to branch out and become company like Samsung, that makes everything from watches, to nuclear power plants. Apple success story was never about big portfolio of products - they were always about few products, but extremely focused and creating whole new markets for them.
So exactly what category of electronics do you propose that Apple can enter that has a larger worldwide penetration than the smart phone market - there are 2.72 billion smart phone users worldwide (https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...)?
It's a market that they largely created, and that was their super-power. And now it's up to them to figure out next big thing, if they want to keep their lead and valuation.
They can still be very successful company without that. But not necessarily as one of the world most valuable companies.
They did not create the smart phone market. By 2004-2005 the average middle class American had cell phones. Cheap prepaid phones could be bought for less than $100 with minutes. The Nokia candy bar phone was already selling well in developing countries. The BlackBerry, Windows Phones, and Palm phones were already selling. It was already clear when Apple was entering the market that the cell phone was gaining ubiquity.
It was so obvious that Apple should be entering the smart phone market with a combination iPod + phone that people were already coining the name iPhone 3 years before it was introduced.
What market are you seeing with the clear growth trajectories that the cell phone had by 2002 that Apple should enter within the next 5 years?
How does that dovetail with Apple’s strengths as a vertically integrated consumer electronics company? What would they bring to the table that would help them compete with the other cloud players? Amazon had first mover advantage and Microsoft had a large enterprise base to draw from and an inside and outside enterprise sales force. Apple has none of that. Google is struggling in the cloud with large companies partially because of no enterprise sales experience and no reputation in the enterprise. Apple would be even less competitive.
I can see that this is the obvious reason why Apple is not doing this. It is a short-sighted view though. Is the Mac Pro (MacBook Pro, etc) a consumer electronics product? Not really. So why do they provide it? Yeah. Same reason they should provide a cloud based on Metal.
