[rphlx]

When you're mostly creating a better case, better UX, and better marketing.. and your partners do most of the really hard low-level technical stuff [1].. why bother with R&D?

Your whole image is based on non-engineer-driven products.

[1] Excluding the A5 CPU

[grkhetan]

Really? Do you think making an OS (Mac OS X and iOS) and all the hardware designs of their dozens of products (remember airport express, iPods, macbook air, etc) are all "easy" to develop? Mac OS X and iOS are based on BSD, but they have been hugely modified. In fact, the kernel is far from BSD now, and they release it as open source Darwin -- it has influence from other OS'es as well.

[rphlx]

Almost all of the difficult underlying technologies in Apple products were created 10-50 years earlier by other companies and government agencies such as Intel, Xerox, NASA, Qualcomm, the US DoD, etc. They are basically the world's most famous system integrator. If you still disagree - let me reflect the question: list the fundamental, widely accepted contributions that Apple made to cutting-edge EE/CS research between 1990-2010. And compare that versus NASA, Microsoft, Intel, etc.

Apple is like that apocryphal hot girl in high school who got the nerds to do her homework. Due to her popularity - it's almost impossible to question her intelligence without bringing a world of hurt down upon yourself, yet despite her good grades and high social status, she isn't generating very many fundamentally new ideas on her own.

[homosaur]

Then why compare Apple with these companies? Compare them with other systems integrators and product people like HP or Compaq or Gateway, etc. Apple does manufacture the most competent desktop environment available, even if the core is open source, they made all the desktop GUI and the dock that every OS (including Windows 7) is now ripping off. HP never managed anything like that.

Besides, clearly the UX, making the better case, and the marketing, etc. is actually the hard part, because there's dozens of companies making chips. There's only one out there releasing Apple-level consumer goods.

[grkhetan]

Probably you need to read and understand more about the tech industry.