Gunpei Yokoi (the designer of the Game Boy) had a philosophy "lateral thinking with withered technology". At the time this meant finding creative new form factors and uses for existing, highly commoditized, technology. There was nothing really special about the Game Boy, but it dominated the portable gaming market because of packaging and software.

The computing industry is now almost entirely commoditized, there's really nothing component-wise you can add that makes a huge difference, it's now about packaging, form factor, use-cases and software. Apple figured this out with the original iPhone. There were plenty of smart-phone devices on the market before then, but Apple figured out the lateral strategy and ended up owning the smartphone market for a few years. Nintendo's Game Boy also had portable gaming predecessors, but they nailed the size, cost and performance triangle.

Nintendo, just like Apple, had loads of portable gaming competitors, the list is endless. And just like Apple, didn't have a real competitor until a huge company with lots of staying power got involved (Sony). Now in many ways, Smartphones and cousin Tablets are Nintendo's competitors, again developed and sold by massive competitors with deep pockets (Samsung, Apple, etc.), but Nintendo's lateral thinking policy is still turning heads and making the company money.

Apple is now in a position where they need to think laterally again. They sort of tried with Smart Watches, but are those really reformulations of commidity hardware? They were pitched and sold very heavily as luxury lifestyle items and the market hasn't embraced them with the kind of fervor previous electro-gadgets were grabbed onto.

Apple's not hitting it either with the new MBP or the aging and impossibly priced Mac Pro trashcans. In fact the Mac Pro is a better example of what's wrong at Apple today than the MBP. It's a new form factor that doesn't provide any new use cases, gets rid of many of the other ones and is so overpriced and mismatched in features that nobody can quite figure out what they're supposed to be for.

Where we're seeing Yokoi-ing style thinking right now is at Microsoft. Repackaging existing hardware in new formulations, driving it with software (sometimes better than others), and then using that combination at reasonable price points to get product into consumer's hands and build profit options. There's now devices that run consistent software from tablet to wall-sized collaboration screens on the market, today, from Microsoft.

When a business person looks at a Surface, they see "light, portable, runs my business software, plus enables me to scribble notes" they get it and who it's for. Nobody can quite figure out who the new MBP or the Mac Pro is supposed to be for. They're still selling because Apple, but there's a real sense that Apple has started to lose the Golden Spark and is just making stuff to make stuff. They don't have a coherent philosophy anymore, it used to be "it just works" and those were glorious times and set laudable goals that I think drove them to innovate and make people centric and approachable machines. But that's gone, it's clearly gone, and they don't have a new corporate philosophy. I think it should be something Yokoi-like, because of the nature of the hardware available these days. But that's not where the company is either.