[mturmon]

I guess it's the magnitude of the effort that is not widely appreciated. DF reported on May 4 (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/05/04/manjoo-moonshots) that:

"I know The New York Times can’t say that it’s certain that Apple is working on a car, but I can. They are. Of course they’re working on a pay TV service. It would be astonishing if they didn’t have teams hard at work on VR and AR. The difference between Apple and other companies is that Apple will spend tens (or in the case of the car, hundreds) of millions of dollars on a new product and never ship it. They don’t just say no to ideas — they say no to long-in-development projects."

Note, "hundreds" of millions of dollars. Whatever you say about DF spin (and you'd be right!), the facts he leaks are generally accurate.

The analysis in the OP (exhibit 3) would seem to indicate ~$5B on R&D on hitherto-unknown products since 2014. Which is astonishingly large. Because it's based on company reports, this must be common knowledge for serious tech industry analysts.