In my opinion, nothing new is happening with Apple but without Steve Job's "Reality Distortion Field" in place people are (slowly) starting to see the truth about Apple ...
Apple's greatest strength has always been marketing and (somehow) they have been able to convince a large portion of the population that there incremental updates involving features that are (often) readily available in other systems are ground-breaking and innovative game changers. This has always been their approach but they have also always struggled to achieve this without Steve Jobs.
My expectation is that, in 10 years time, people will be looking back and claiming that Apple returned to being a niche brand because the death of Steve Jobs made them a far less innovative company; and, personally, I believe that this is really caused by Apple's marketing being unsuccessful in the absence of Steve Jobs.







