Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook talks about the new iPad. Photograph by Eric Risberg/AP

You’ve got to hand it to Apple: the company has the uncanny ability to make ideas that you’ve seen and heard before seem like things that have just sprung, fully formed, from the elastic mind of Jony Ive. Nowhere is this trick better on display than during the company’s tri-annual events. Those three nerd Super Bowls—the World Wide Developers Conference; an iPhone-themed session in the fall; and usually a wild-card event, such as a special day devoted to a new product like the Apple Watch—are where Apple unveils its biggest software and hardware updates to a mostly unsuspecting public.

On Wednesday, at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, in San Francisco, the company was in full force with its fall showcase, announcing a variety of new products including a very large iPad, a new version of its Apple TV set-top box, and, of course, a couple of new iPhones—the 6S and the 6S Plus. But what was most striking was not the newness of the products. Instead, it was the fact that we’d seen most of this film before: about ninety per cent of what Apple revealed has already been shown by Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft.

Mind you, this is not a new skill that Apple has acquired. In fact, some of the company’s biggest hits were simply a rethink or tweak of an old idea or two. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, and Apple certainly didn’t create the first smartphone. The company also didn’t invent the first tablet, and when it introduced its new one this week, the main selling point was that Apple had enlarged an object that it had recently shrunk.

The iPad Pro was perhaps the most egregious case of the “me too”s that Apple has perpetrated recently. The device is a 12.9-inch version of its popular tablet; it also has a snap-on keyboard accessory and a long stylus that the company is calling the Apple Pencil. It demoed this new machine—presumably aimed at creative professionals and enterprise customers—by showing off how well it worked with Microsoft’s suite of productivity apps. That’s ironic, because the iPad Pro, with its keyboard cover and stylus, is a spitting image of Microsoft’s own flagship tablet, the Surface. (It’s also worth pointing out that, in 2010, Steve Jobs very publicly derided the idea of needing a stylus at all: “If you see a stylus, they blew it!”)

The new and improved Apple TV also sent waves of familiarity cascading onto anyone watching on Wednesday. It featured a universal-search feature that lets you find any show on any service (accomplished already by Amazon, Roku, and Microsoft), which you can access by voice commands issued to Siri (Amazon’s Fire TV did this a year ago). The device also lets you play games on your TV (Google, Roku, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony) and features a touch remote (Samsung).

But the Apple TV also has a few new tricks. It’s able to search for content using complex, human language processing (like “show me the James Bond movies, but only the ones with Sean Connery”), and its interface is considerably slicker and smoother than anything else currently on the market. Instead of standard film and TV box art, you get subtly shifting 3D dioramas, while soothing, transparent panels slide to and fro as you float through the interface. Siri appears as a multicolored, sentient wave ready to do your bidding. Icons even wobble slightly in response to the movement of your finger over the remote’s touch pad.

And that’s part of the reason why Apple’s “me too”s end up feeling like “me-first”s. In the digital age, execution is staggeringly important, and there isn’t a single company in existence that can pull off polish and simplicity like Apple. While other companies struggle just to get all of their devices and services talking to one another, Tim Cook and friends are worrying over the details that actually make consumers pay attention. The products don’t just work the way they should; they feel the way they should. Reducing friction, even a single click, can change the way a user perceives an entire product.

That kind of thinking was clearly in evidence when the company presented its “3D Touch” technology for the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. The devices have a new kind of display that not only registers where your fingers are, but how hard they’re pressing on that particular part of the display. Pushing down harder on icons or items in a list gives you contextual menus allowing quick access to features that were previously buried or required multiple taps to reach. It is novel and certainly unique—nothing like a me-too.

That’s partly Apple’s magic show: being able to blend the familiar, the known, and the obvious with something (even a little bit) totally new. The company’s senior vice-president of marketing, Phil Schiller, told Businessweek “You can’t just say, ‘Here it is. It does the same thing 5 percent better than last year.’ Nobody cares.” But that five per cent is often the difference between making something that people talk about, and making something they forget. That five per cent is where Apple lives.

In a show filled mostly with ideas and products that we’ve seen before—and devices that aren’t necessarily worn out, but worn down—Apple was still able to suspend cynicism, if only for a moment. Taste is hard to quantify, and delight is a difficult sensation to wrest from a consumer—particularly a consumer who’s owned six different versions of the iPhone. But Apple excels in drawing power from those ethereal places like no other modern corporation, through invention, however small, and theatre, often big and bombastic.

A year or two from now, will people still be thinking about Amazon’s Fire TV or Microsoft’s Surface (did they ever?), or will they be controlling a high-stakes game of Crossy Road on their iPad Pros against competitors wielding the Apple TV touch remote? I think you know the answer. And Apple knows it, too.