Alexa (Applexa?) could have been a natural Apple product. HomePod is clearly a catch-up, and not a particularly interesting one given that Alexa has already moved to built-in screens, and creating an AI home-hub in a variety of form factors, both big and small, is a trivial update now.

Alexa gives consumers utility/service computing without all the tragic time-wasting updater/installer/management nonsense forced on them by desktops, laptops, and (to a smaller extent) tablets and apps.

Cook's Apple has missed the point of this, which is the subtle but huge difference between consumer utility computing and content and hardware consumption computing.

Jobs was a genius at making everything fit together, and I suspect he was reaching for a utility strategy. The iPhone and iPad were the first generation of utility devices, while Siri was a first gen utility service. They were wildly impressive for their time, but still limited by elements of desktop legacy thinking - which is why we have to wait while apps launch and close, instead of just being able to do whatever we want to do.

Cook sells SKUs, not synergies or utility. I see no evidence that Apple is able to think of the future with a unified vision that doesn't involve selling things - even if those things are music and video content units - enhanced by some very constrained AI.

Right now Amazon is more of a synergy company than Apple. The aim seems to be total domination of retail, but there's going to be some overlap in services and in hardware too, and Amazon seem better placed culturally to innovate in ways that win that race.