Re: I don't really care about music...
"Something bad has happened to Apple over the last four or five years or so. "
Steve Jobs died just under 4 years ago. Just sayin'.
But seriously, I don't really agree. Apple hasn't changed. That's kinda the problem. Tim Cook is very much proving to be a caretaker CEO; all his success stories are just iterations of previous successes (iPhones, iPads, Macbooks), while his actual innovations are poorly-judged flops (Apple Music, Watch). He's doing very well at trading on past success, and very poorly at making new successes.
Once the competition starts to get serious about market, Apple tend to lose market share like crazy, retreat to the high-end luxury zone with massive pricing to keep their margins up, and eventually become marginal players trying to keep ultra-high end pricing against equal-or-better spec machines being sold for half the price, where upon their presence in that area is reduced to fanboy bait only. They simply aren't very competitive, because they're so reliant on high margins over market share.
This has gone quite well for them recently, but it's a high-risk, high-reward strategy. Jobs got it right about half the time, mostly toward the end of his life, and Apple pretty much exploded when it went well (but also imploded pretty badly when it didn't - to the point of having to go cap-in-hand to the Old Enemy at Microsoft in '97). Cook, conversely, appears to be terrible at picking winners, but remains wedded to the strategy of dominating new markets and then abandoning them to cheaper rivals the moment prices start to fall.
This is kind of a shame, because Tim Cook is a hell of a lot more likeable than Jobs ever was. I suspect that, while Apple isn't doomed, it IS entering a period of stagnation and decline now. They'll keep recycling the same few products, all of which are no longer really innovative or impressive, and all of which are starting to get displaced by rivals who are willing to cut prices to pick up market share.