Here's to the humdrum ones: Has Apple truly forgotten how to innovate?

iPad sales down and Apple Watch still failing to take off - has Apple finally run out of steam?

Apple released a new advert yesterday, the punchline of which is two slides. They read: "If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone".

The advert is intended to celebrate the app-based ecosystem of the iPhone which is still most certainly the platform's strongest offering in relation to its rivals. Android is still too messy, unreliable and fragmented to truly stand up next to the cleanness and reliability of Apple's ‘walled garden'.

Meanwhile, Windows Phone and BlackBerry remain largely as afterthoughts in this regard.

But it's a strange advert, which may reveal a genuine fear in the Apple camp - that people are starting not to see the actual difference between Apple and rival products, which are now better built, better-featured but, sadly for Apple, usually much cheaper. It seems that Apple might be feeling a need to define itself by what it's not, rather than by what it is.

As a comparison to the classic 'Here's to the Crazy Ones' advert of 1997 - which was all about defining an Apple user - it's hugely telling. Perhaps a modern spin would involve John and Yoko throwing a Samsung Galaxy S4 out of their hotel window, or Kermit the Frog smashing a OnePlus One to bits with one of Animal's drumsticks.

Is Apple now living in genuine fear of its rivals, then? And is that justified? Estimated second quarter figures from analysts at KGI Securities show iPhones are still a booming business, with a suggestion that 54.2 million have been shipped up to June 2015.

But KGI also suggests that iPad sales are now down by 33.5 per cent, and that the fancy new Apple Watch has ‘only' (and I do use that term loosely) shipped 3.9 million units - leading analysts to feel ‘disappointed' at its failure to ignite the market. Apparently, orders have plummeted by 90 per cent since the device's debut week.

What's up doc'?

So what's the actual problem with Apple? Personally, I think it's simply that the company has forgotten how to innovate. It's unable to design truly new devices, and has since 2011 been iterating. It began by iterating on its own products (a thinner, lighter iPad or iPhone almost every year) and then, when it ran out of places to go there, began iterating on the products of others (the Apple Watch).

Although, it's perhaps not quite that simple. Some may argue Apple never had a truly new idea, but just marketed better. After all, touch screen devices, tablets and computers that heaped screen and CPU together all existed before.

But Steve Jobs - and sorry to bring him up, but his passing remains the root of the problem - would never have released the Apple Watch in the state it's in. A Bluetooth-reliant gimmick that takes half a second to even tell you the time, and still has no discernible apps to give it a standout reason to exist on its own.

He'd have bullied, cajoled, barked at and - finally - hugely encouraged, every hardware, software and user-interface engineer in the company until they'd come up with something he could stand on a stage and rave about, while tired old hacks (not just deluded fans like Stephen Fry) would somehow be fooled into finding it essential all over again.

How would Steve Jobs have treated the company's other recent launches, including a shameless attempt to copy Spotify, and 'yet another' digital wallet (which admittedly is still at early doors).

An ex-colleague of mine identified the iPad, just minutes after its reveal, as "Apple's answer to a problem we didn't know we had". I still don't completely agree with that, but I can absolutely see how it would appear that way. And it was really just a giant iPhone.

The pollution of the smart device industry with a proliferation of screen sizes has inherently damaged Apple's business model - that's my belief. Steve Jobs couldn't have stopped this market trend, of course, but he'd have quietly shown it up as the folly it may well be through designing better products. He probably wouldn't have had to cannibalise the iPad's sales with the iPhone 6 Plus. He'd have thought of something else.

As it stands, Apple's returning to bitching publicly about its rivals. Originally, this was a phase Jobs also took part in ("Get a Mac" etc.) but this was in a desperate attempt to build the company back up to profitability after he took the reins again in 1997.

By 2007, it didn't need to be done that way anymore as the company rode high on a series of massive innovations in music, smartphones and portable internet-ready devices.

All things considered, it feels like Apple might be returning to its own personal Dark Ages, and that frustration is now starting to show on the surface.

But if the "crazy ones" have become the humdrum ones, and there's no innovation left on the industry table at all, that's only going to spell bad news across the board. Samsung, HTC and others can only dine out on the iPhone's legacy for so long...