I like Mac128's comments "..I would point out that Apple is not the only computer company that spent years pounding its head against a wall trying to secure a monopoly with proprietary technology.." - yes indeed. As a tech based design company it is always hard to know when to stop working on a project/concept when there are potential huge profits to be made. I know of many, usually commercial people, who so chase that illusive patent onto which they want their name.
There's a gift in knowing where your talents lie. Apple in the early 1980's had a serious issue with thinking, based on their early success with the Apple ][, that they were "smarter" than everyone else and if they chose to do something they would not only succeed but be the "leaders of the industry". If you strip off all the rose-colored nostalgia we project backwards on them it's pretty obvious that they were not, and did not.
Name a major product of Apple's other than the Apple ][ and its variants that came out of Apple's labs between 1979 and 1984 and was an actual "success" on the market. (And the Mac itself didn't exactly set the world on fire, for that matter. It generated a lot of buzz but didn't actually sell that well.) It's a darn short list. They certainly had their interesting "research projects", aka, the Lisa, but when it came to nuts and bolts engineering of a marketable product they were *terrible*. Apple's engineering approach as epitomized by the Apple ][ was best described as analogous to
Madman Muntz's
"Mutzing", IE, taking a product and cutting out features and circuitry to make it as simple and as cheap as possible. (IE, the Apple ]['s producing a color display without according-to-Hoyle "proper" NTSC circuitry, and the Disk ]['s use of a "standard" disk drive mechanism with all the frills and "unessential" circuitry ripped out and compensated for with software.) Doing that certainly takes "talent", but that approach is poorly suited to engineering a complete complex product from scratch. As Captain Spock once noted: "As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create." Substitute "simplify" for "destroy".
Apparently Apple must of been compensating for its history of "Muntzing" because the Apple /// and the "Twiggy" drives are classic examples of products which are highly over-engineered and *more* complicated than necessary to provide their level of functionality, which is at best only a small percentage gain over the functionality of a "generic" product. The 400/800k floppy drives in the Macintosh are an example of the same mindset... to make it "better" they made Sony's drive *more complicated and expensive*, not less, and the result was an insignificant increase in capacity and increased costs for the user. Would it have made *any difference* in the long-term success of the Macintosh if they'd simply bought off-the-shelf floppy drives from Sony and replaced the IWM with a Western Digital WD1773? (Or simply adjusted the IWM to work with single-speed drives. Commodore made GCR drives that varied the number of sectors per track without varying the spindle speed. Clearly Commodore had better engineers than Apple.) Not a whit. Consumers wouldn't of cared at all, and the Mac would of been cheaper.
If you're going to innovate (and innovation is good), concentrate on places where there are significant gains to be made and real benefits to be provided to the user. Turning inward and engineering Rube Goldberg solutions that provide little or no positive benefits and only work to lock customers into your overpriced and proprietary product is... frankly pointless. It might increase your per-unit profits to set yourself up as the only source of parts for your product but by definition it limits your market to people gullible enough to get suckered into buying into your boarded-up little universe. (Unless you plan to go into the business of selling/licensing your proprietary innovation to all comers on reasonable terms so you can *create* the "industry standard". Which is something Apple has *never done*. When they make a proprietary product they keep it on the reservation and guard it so jealously that the world has no choice but to look somewhere else. The same thing happened to IBM with Microchannel and it cost them control of the PC marketplace.)
Anyway, that was my point about "innovation". Apple wasn't "innovating" with floppy drives, they were self-flagellating and trying to prove to the universe that they could innovate in the 1980s the way they did in the 1970s. They pretty much faceplanted on that one, sorry. They produced a perfectly usable product in the end, but that was mostly due to Sony's engineering succeeding despite having Apple's failure grafted onto it.