Investors, Mr Gillis believes, are focused on future sources of revenue growth and, while the Google camp appears to be brimming with ideas for products that could turn into money-spinners in years to come, Apple has given little away about where its future profits will come from.

BBC: How Apple and Google's fortunes are linked

Only four months ago Google was in the former camp, though right now their innovation kudos is high.

FORBES: Why Innovators Like Google Spend Time With the Laggards

In the AI optimist camp, futurist and Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil also sees intelligent machines precipitating human extinction, of a sort, only in Kurzweil's telling, humanity is not exterminated but subsumed into a superintelligent machine.

CNN: Is AI a threat to humanity?

Then the Android camp had success with 7in tablets like Amazon's Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7, and now Apple supposedly will announce its own smaller iPad in October.

BBC: Viewpoint: Apple's iPhone launches no longer excite