[thbb]

Apple certainly does well in investing in R&D and looking towards some amount of pivoting.

However, this quasi-exponential growth in spending reminds me of a pathetic moment at a EU commission meeting I attended, on research and innovation public funds in 2010.

The EU commissioner basically complained that Europe had no Unicorns like the GAFAs, but wanted to be reassuring: this is about to change. We will prevail, because we'll spend more on R&D (through tax money) than all of these do together.

With the implicit assumption that the more you spend, the bigger the returns.