So, a couple different thoughts on this.
First off, @OP, Apple's designs are still distinctive to this day. They were distinctive before Jonny Ive, they were distinctive while he was there, and they're still distinctive now that he's gone. Whether we're talking their desktops, laptops, phones, or tablets, it doesn't take much effort to distinguish an bit of Apple hardware from someone else's.
There's a reason other companies copy Apple's design choices, and not the other way around.
Separately, I agree to an extent that oftentimes it feels Apple is resting on its laurels. Maybe there are risks out there yet to take, and maybe Apple ought to be taking them. Then again, in the Linux world, where there is no central authority and nobody to make ultimate decisions about things, and where anyone can literally rewrite or redesign any part of any program they might ever want to, there's a reason most Linux desktops more-or-less look like the Mac's Finder. Or, to invoke a little bit of Star Trek VI here, “Just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that we should do that thing.”
A very good portion of the CPU-related leaps and gains we've made over the last, say, four decades have for the most part been a matter of finding out ways of doing things, then improving, then finding better ways, and then learning to streamline the process and effectively eliminate all the not-really-the-best ways of doing those things. And in that time, we've gone from the 8088 to the 80x86 to the eventual slew of iterations of x86_64, and simultaneously 68000 to the '020/030/040, to PPC 601 (et al) to the G3/G4/G5, then into the x86_64 world, and then out of it again into the ARM world, which has been being worked on for probably 20 or 30 years at this point in different ways and forms, finally maturing into something genuinely usable as a basis for a workstation (desktop and laptop). Apple's doing a very respectable job of holding their own, given that their competition has been from-scratch-designing and building CPUs for longer than Apple has been in business.
Now, I've owned an iPhone 4S but mostly Android-based smart phones, and while in many respects Android devices are more desirable, one of the biggest problems, historically, with Android is the licensing and fragmentation. It's been pretty wretched for a lot of people for a long time. There are and have been, generationally, some exceptional Android-based phones out there coming at us from Samsung, LG, and others. However, there have also been some pretty wretched ones as well, mostly from lower-end and basically no-name companies, but also from companies we ostensibly respect (such as Samsung and LG).
Ultimately, this is a free cosmos (at least according to the 4th Doctor) and so you can choose what you want to buy, whether it's from Apple or some place else.
