[bryanlarsen]

My question is more about the process. Everybody knows that Apple does a lot of internal R&D that never sees the light of day. For example, the heavily rumoured Apple TV.

My question is: do they do a small number of internal R&D projects, or do they do a large number that gets continuously filtered?

[exelius]

Apple approaches R&D a bit differently than Google does. Apple sees R&D as primarily a means to achieve operational efficiency and/or supplier independence. Product development is driven by customer needs and is tightly controlled at the executive level.

Apple likely has a half-dozen products sketched out that they can't release until some technology / market hurdle is overcome. So they focus their R&D on the technology hurdles, and their lobbying/PR efforts on the market ones.