Steve Jobs did not take risks. His products were rarely meant to be first, they were meant to be best. He’d wait until a market was stable and then he’d jump in and put the pieces together better than anyone else. Smartphones were around long before the iPhone, for example, but they were universally terrible. Jobs changed that.

Apple is a publicly traded company. Publicly traded companies demand growth. Find a chart of Apple’s revenues since Jobs returned. It’s literally exponential. And the explosion in that growth is mostly due to the iPhone. Smartphones opened up an entirely new product category and Apple succeeded in exploiting that category better than any other company in the world.

Think about Apple’s two great success stories: the iPod and the iPhone. In both cases, product categories that already existed, but that Apple entered and grew massively. Now think about where we are today. What major new categories are there? There’s smartwatches, and the Apple Watch is a pretty good watch. And there’s streaming devices, and the Apple TV is pretty good as well. But these aren’t huge markets. They don’t make a dent in Apple’s bottom line.

So now you’re Tim Cook. You’ve taken the reins of a company that has exploded in the last two decades. And yet the strategy they used to achieve that growth isn’t applicable anymore, at least not for now. So what do you do? You take more risks. You jump into markets earlier. And you release products that are a bit less polished than Apple products normally are. I hope that’s a satisfactory answer.

As an aside, the only product OP posted that’s really dumb is the new Mighty Mouse (I think they’re still calling it that, at least), which makes no sense whatsoever. The Apple Pencil charges insanely fast (i.e. it’s not going to be plugged in there long), it’s actually kind of amazing, and it comes with a cable as well. The battery case looks dumb but looks and feels nicer in person. And the iPhone and MacBook dongles are meant to be ungainly, as a way of pushing the market in the direction Apple wants (in this case, away from wires), because Apple has a dedicated enough customer base that they can slightly annoy them without actually losing customers. By the way, this is the same strategy Microsoft employed with UAC in Vista – annoy customers, pressure developers to stop asking for admin rights, but know that this annoyance won’t cost any customers.

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Will add sauce later.