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Apple Explains Why Its R&D Spending Is On the Rise (cnbc.com)
Apple has steadily increased its spending on research and development over the past few quarters. An executive with the company explained why that's the case. From a report on CNBC: Company's financial guru attributes the spending to something of a much smaller scale: chips. It may not sound like it, but that research is "very strategic and important" for Apple to differentiate itself from the rest of the industry, chief financial officer Luca Maestri said on Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco. "Today, we do much more in-house development of some fundamental technologies than we used to do a few years ago, when we did more of that in the supplier base -- the work we do around processors or sensors," Maestri said. "It's very important for us because we can push the envelope on innovation, we can better control timing, cost, quality. We look at that as a great strategic investment." On Tuesday, Maestri also noted that Apple's "product portfolio is much larger than it used to be," and that keeping all these products moving along in parallel adds up, especially with smaller markets, like the Apple Watch. While Maestri said Apple drops a "meaningful" amount of cash on products that do not generate revenue today, these products are not very large "in the total scheme of things," Maestri said. "They add up over time, and hopefully, those are good bets that we are making for the future of the company," Maestri said.
Intel has been having major issues recently. Qualcomm has apparently been a thorn in their side. Apple is no longer willing to tolerate a lot of outside suppliers being in control, so apple will bring more and more production under their own control?
It makes sense, Apple's in-house processors have been a major competitive advantage, particularly at a time when Qualcomm has been leveraging patents to get a near-monopoly in the SoC space. Apple's chips have been a generation ahead of the competition for some time, although their infrequent release schedule mitigates that when everybody else catches up and then passes them before the next A chip is then released.
a tech company has to defend or justify spending money on R&D...for tech.
It is as if everyone thinks that "tech" just falls out of the ether like some magic pixie dust, and a "great" tech company is really only just a better tech integrator (like Dell) than everyone else. Or should be.
Carl Icahn I'm sure would not be amused at the frivolous and speculative spending of valuable shareholder money that should instead be used to enhance shareholder [his] value...today.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/carl-icahns-2-billion-apple-stake-was-a-prime-example-of-investment-inequality-2016-06-07
making thinner and more apple only service takes a lot of R&D.
now what about a real workstation? Some kind of server or at least the rights to run os x in a vm on any base hardware?
Theres really no really research left that can make workstations better. I commend you for being so resistant to change, but Apple will lose money if they don’t stay ahead of the trend and unfortunately I don't think workstations are going to make Apple tons of money.
To me, the salient question is whether they are investing to increase profits, or to make better products. The lack of updates in most of the mac line, along with battery and memory issues that crippled the new Macbooks, are decisions about resource allocation - Apple simply isn't interested. This is especially strange, since they still have strong development on OSX. On the mobile side, there is a lot of criticism about a lack of innovation to drive new product sales—but what I see is Apple simply looking to R&D to stabilise cost and production, based on the goal of meeting market expectations more consistently. All of this is very Tim Cook, and not very Steve Jobs. For all his faults, Steve did seem genuine about his passion to make "insanely great" products. Tim seems committed to demonstrable returns stability.
Yes it's not like Apple designs their own processors for their mobile devices or anything. Oh wait, they totally do that
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.