The first iPhone was fine, but it was the second generation and the app store that actually delivered a "real" smart phone. The retina display in the iPhone 4 m

The first iPhone was fine, but it was the second generation and the app store that actually delivered a "real" smart phone. The retina display in the iPhone 4 may have been an incremental improvement, but it wasn't a "small" one. But. yeah, decreasingly minor improvements after 2010. The passionate Apple 'cult' of geeky superfans existed long before the iPhone, even the before the Mac, and it continued for very long time. What the author is noting is that well over a decade of minor enhancements, rent-seeking, and "innovation shaped objects" like the Vision Pro are finally killing off the this geeky crowd of superfans. Apple will continue to make tons of money as an upper middle class lifestyle brand, hawking their talismans at Target. But that is irrelevant to the authors point. Apple doesn't need the super enthusiast "cult" anymore, and it's slowly fading away.