[rdl]

The other depressing interpretation is that they're achieving less per dollar spent on R&D (becoming less efficient); they certainly seem to be achieving less per release of product now, so it would be consistent. Maybe there was a time when Apple got the most brilliant people wanting to work there because it was Apple; if that's no longer true, their efficiency would decrease.

(Arguably the same thing happened in K-12 education; when women were largely excluded from other professions, teaching positions were filled by the best women in the workforce; now, many of them would rather be doctors/engineers/lawyers/etc., so the quality of educators has decreased to the market level.)

[nikdaheratik]

From looking at the numbers, they would need to be spending 10x more to achieve less per release. It seems much more likely that they're putting their resources into something else, like a car or some other new category. This would also partially explain why some of their more mature products aren't getting anything too interesting, though no one else seems to be moving into the space either. So it could also be that they're is only so much you can do with mobile phones right now.

[Alex3917]

If their efficiency is decreasing then that's probably more related to having too many products rather than not-smart-enough people. The cost of shipping each new release roughly follows Metcalfe's law, meaning that each existing product/feature you need to support going forward makes the next release exponentially more expensive.

My hope is that the car is a front and they're secretly building arcologies, but in reality they're probably just building some shitty car.