Some points I agree with, some I do not, but let us not stray away from the main point of the whole article: it's not that Apple does not innovate at all. It's that it's not doing it nearly often enough and *certainly* not as much as it's trying to convince us it does.
The problem is that extremely low "borrow-to-lent" ratio. Apple feels very good about itself perfecting other people's ideas but it does not try hard enough to present genuinely new ones - and when it does, it's more often than not, intentionally in a proprietary way, not an "open" one (Apple is not the only one doing it of course but it makes it even harder to see how it contributes to that general "pool of technical knowledge" everyone draws from).
To be honest, regarding the "removing borders between devices" thing, it all depends very much on one's workflow and general use cases. I found the WWDC demo interesting, for instance, but not innovative because its true goal is not making my life easier, it is getting me to buy more Apple devices. Innovation can be based on pure commercial interests, yes, but when this is coming from a company that's doing that demo while refusing to do things that would actually make my life easier and remove borders between devices, like run MacOS on my M1 iPad Pro for instance, it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I'll make up my mind about this when I get to use the "real-time data exchange" feature for a bit of time, but right now this is how I feel about that much-talked about demo.
On a final note, I completely agree that simplicity is hard and that, from a development point of view, things that look simple can be really hard to pull off. But "simplicity is innovation" is an exaggeration and probably not a fair use of the latter word. The key element of innovation is breaking new ground, offering something completely new. The way it is offered can be simple or complex, it can even be far from ideal in its execution. But it has to be new. Apple is indeed very good at simplifying other people's stuff so that it works better. But again, that can't be called innovation. It's perfecting what's already there. I welcome it too, as a reporter as well as a consumer, but... you know. We also need the new. Apple is ideally placed in the tech world to deliver more of that - unlimited resources, supportive customers etc. - and yet it doesn't because it's too focused on its bottom line. That's unacceptable and needs to change.
