Not sure I'd call taking existing technologies and putting them in laptops/watches innovation rather than iteration on existing stuff, but we're all different so it's all good.
If that's all it is, why isn't everyone doing it? And to the extent that they are doing the same sort of things, why are Apple taking on the order of 90% of the profits in multiple market segments? Clearly they are doing something different.
My recollection of the time window is wrong, but I’d say microprocessors, then smartphones were fundamental. Chips ate both minicomputers and mainframes, and the smartphone totally altered how people interact with computers. Tablets are just big phones and watches are just smaller subsets. Software wise, the web. The net is old but it took the web to make it explode.