[petke]

Also apple only spends about 3% of revenue on R&D. Google spends about 15% (and so does ms) if i remember correctly. I think at some point this is going to show. If apple isn't careful they might end up making the pretty but dumb phones of tomorrow.

[aroman]

If you consider the fact that Apple's revenue is almost four times that of Google's, the actual difference in spending is not very substantial.

Presumably there's some point of diminishing returns on R&D for one company in the billions of dollars range...

[simonh]

Indeed. Apple has been ramping up R&D spending by about 40% per year for many years, which is a phenomenal ramp up, it's just that its revenues have grown even more dramatically.