Apple wasn't doing so great in 2000. Its "PC" market share was ~2%. Jobs had just come back a few years earlier and MS made a large investment, but neither the iPod nor OS X had come out yet, so it was quite a turnaround story.
In the earlyish 2000s, Apple started to look interesting as a consumer electronics company even if it wasn't clear they were committed to it. And the whole mobile trend wasn't obvious to a lot of us at that point.
I talked to them as an analyst in that era and they were still spending attention on enterprisey products like Xserve.
And even the initial iPhone in 2007 wasn't clearly a game-changer. It was the 3GS that really made a lot of people take notice.
