[AnthonyMouse]

Just because you have a hundred billion dollars doesn't mean it's worth spending it to try (and quite plausibly fail) to topple an entrenched competitor in a tangential line of business. Monolithic corporations are massively inefficient because the combination of wealth and bureaucracy is the recipe for waste. Let them give the money to shareholders -- isn't that why they were supposed to be in business? Then if it makes sense to invest the money in some other line of business, the investors will invest it in some other company doing that thing.

The fact is that smartphones are now a mature product. There will continue to be incremental improvements, but nobody is really expecting a future iPhone to be to the current iPhone what the original iPhone was to Blackberry. The market is now a cash cow. They have an existing technology and customer loyalty that they can milk for multiple years until increasing competition eats away at their margins, doing that is a profitable medium-term strategy, so that's a completely reasonable and expected thing for them to do.

They could invest their cash in some speculative technology and maybe get lucky, but so can their shareholders.