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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.
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.
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.
I've made this comment before, but I think it bears repeating. I'm not really sure we can tell if Apple "just doesn't care about a lot of products in their lineup anymore" or not, until we let them get the new "spaceship" campus up and running?
That's a huge real-estate investment that allows them to hire a whole lot of employees or contractors, especially given that Apple has said they don't plan on getting rid of any of its EXISTING office space.
I think historically, Apple has *always* struggled with trying to do so much with so little manpower. They went head-to-head with companies the size of Microsoft, while selling a whole line of hardware along with the operating system and applications for it - when Apple employed FAR fewer people. This has resulted in the ongoing wisdom of "avoiding revision A of a new Mac" and the famed shortages of new products at launch time, among other things.
It appears the head-count is about to dramatically increase at Apple, and I'd like to think a lot of things have gotten behind because it's slated to get addressed when new teams are hired to tackle some of it. The company certainly has the money to make those changes.
I'm one of the people who shelled out the crazy high price for a new Mac Pro "cylinder" workstation, a month or two after it came out. I even upgraded it to 64GB of RAM via a 3rd. party memory supplier and upgraded the 256GB SSD in it to 512GB when I could source the needed part on the used market. I'm using it to type this message today and its still my "main" computer I use at home. But I only invested in this thing because I put faith in Apple to support it at least as well as they did the previous Mac Pro towers. (I owned a 2006 and a 2008 model before this one, and both were excellent workhorses that more than paid for themselves with work I got done with them.) Essentially, my loyalty was taken advantage of. Apple not only couldn't release a suitable display of their own for the machine, but never even took the obvious step of marketing an external drive storage cabinet for it. I bought a 3rd. party (DATOptic e-Box) external Thunderbolt RAID enclosure that I use with it -- but the point is, it looks like something that belongs on a Windows PC, not a Mac. It's bigger and noisier than the Mac Pro itself, and I can't put the Mac into sleep mode while it's on, or it doersn't handle it gracefully and can cause data corruption. Apple has never sold a single video card upgrade for this machine either, which is kind of ridiculous for a "Pro" desktop workstation. The dual FirePro D500's in this one perform about as well as a pair of ATI Radeon 7950 or 7970 cards, but OS X doesn't even support CrossFire mode with them. There should really be a program to take these in to have a newer, better graphics card upgrade professionally installed, since both nVidia and ATI/AMD are selling cards that are essentially 2 generations ahead of this technology now.