Seems like a strange take. It wasn't per se a luxury brand, it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?

The fact it stood for quality doesn't mean you can't keep offering quality at lower budget and lower spec levels, while still pushing high-budget and high-spec levels. In fact it seems very succesful in doing so and keeps capturing more of the market.

You could say there is limited growth in the hardware (total pie), and that there is are increasingly smaller shares of the market share pie left to conquer. And that's mostly true.

But Apple has built out its Services business, from $12b in 2012 to $110b last year. That $110b revenue is more than Tesla's revenue, and that has a market cap of $1.2 trillion. And unlike hardware, services (i.e. software) are extremely high-margin. It's estimated that $110b revenue constitutes something like $80b in gross margin, whereas Tesla's $100b revenue lead to <$17b in gross margin, and just 3.8b in net profit.

A push into budget offerings increases users and scales service revenue, a high-margin and fast growing business. Apple has been a tremendous success. I won't make predictions of the future but its push for affordable devices was a strategic win, to the contrary of your point.

>it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?

I think their marketing pretends they are cutting edge, but I always found them behind. iOS was years behind Android in features. Macbooks don't even have Nvidia in them.

Apple is never 1st place in tech quality. At best they are 2nd place.