Apple’s R&D Team has been spending billions of dollars on various secret projects. And no one knows what these projects are — that’s why they’re “secret”, duh!
In the last quarter of 2016, Apple spent a whopping 2.8 billion dollars on R&D.
This number has been steadily increasing over the past half a decade or so. Just five years ago, Apple’s R&D budget was a whisker over $ 0.5 billion. Since then, they have been on a spending spree of sorts.
One can make an argument that Apple’s R&D cost is increasing because their overall revenue is also growing. So essentially, they are paying the same attention to it, only, on a larger scale. However, that’s not true as well.
Apple’s R&D spending, as a percentage of their revenue, has also grown.
Based on rumours, these are the most likely candidates on which Apple has been burning their greens!
- Apple Car — although, to be honest, this seems like a distant dream now.
- Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR and VR).
- Unified health solutions, which include a special ecosystem between medical institutions and Apple Watch.
- Newer and faster chips. (We’ll be doing a detailed post about this soon, so stay tuned!)
- Opening more manufacturing/assembling units outside America, and developing the specific technology that can be best produced in those countries. India, obviously, is a top priority.
And finally, Apple is being all hush-hush about their spending. Big surprise there, huh!?
Tim Cook has gone on record to say this about Apple’s R&D efforts —
The products that are in R&D, there is quite a bit of investment in there for products and services that are not currently shipping or derivations of what is currently shipping. So I don’t want to talk about the exact split of it, but you can look at the growth rate and conclude that there’s a lot of stuff that we’re doing beyond the current products.
Source: Yahoo News
