I was really surprised with the R&D number and thought it was incorrect since I knew the spending to be small. Just checked that in the last 2/3 years there has been a major upgrade in R&D spending.
Not sure where all the money is going though. There hasn't been any major breakthrough improvement in Apple tech to match the spending. Any big stealth project? What does everyone thinks?
The car is the one that I was thinking. But can that single project use up that much R&D budget? You need time to scale any project even R&D. A quick check suggest Tesla's 2010-15 R&D budget is less than 3B. I guess Apple has the money to spend but still its a surprisingly big amount for a single project specially since in the other department the lack of innovation would suggest lessening of R&D.
Could it be that they are also not as efficient with their R&D spending since they have money to burn? Despite my misgivings about a lot of thing Apple, one thing I would like to see happen is actually to use the money they have and do R&D that can improve the state of the art. There is really few companies that have the budget to truly go after some lofty goals.
Oh, that is separable to make manufacturing cheaper. They ship the same powersupply worldwide and just swap out the plug. It's not for your benifit. Although if you travel a lot it is handy.
That makes sense. But I've replaced more power cables than I can remember because the bit that connects to the laptop frayed. Had to replace the entire 80$ item every time. I'm really not that careless with them, they fray so easily.
Exactly. Apple doesn't really have much of an incentive to make the cables last longer, because you are GOING to buy a new one. People aren't inconvenienced enough by this to make Apple fix this issue.
