To answer your main question now that I have a minute to type:

People may not like this but Apple didn't innovate very much. They were always second to the market. During their renaissance with the imac they were only good at making colourful plastic shells. Moving along they were second to the market for mp3 players. What apple was good at was refining existing products, so for the mp3 player they made it smaller by using a smaller hdd (1.8") and copied the wheel from a tv remote iirc. They were second to the market for smartphones, blackberry was everywhere and nicknamed the crackberry. The refinement on that was that they correctly distinguished between consumption device and creation device. The phone was primarily consumption, so they made a full size screen and a software keyboard for the occasional entry. iPad was a bigger version of that once the price of touchscreens came down.

Outside of specific products they were very good at marketing and branding. Remember those mac vs pc commercials? They had to portray PC as old nerdy, and mac as cool young hip. Or when the ipod came out they had all those dancing silhouettes. They put themselves as the cool brand and slowly became a luxury brand.