Has Apple lost its way?

[LurkerJ]

fatslob-:O said:

Just take this in for a moment. The SUM of all of Apple's component manufacturers R&D budget dwarfs them ... 

I am not asking for Apple themselves to manufacture every component they use but you can't exactly give a whole lot of credit to Apple's "innovation" when most of their contributions are not even their own! 

They spend some on R&D alright but on their balance sheet it practically works out to been nonexistent compared to other big tech companies ... 

They need to do much more before I can take them seriously as "innovators" ... 

I highly doubt Apple will start designing their own GPUs when they have yet to buy a tiny dedicated graphics company like Imagination Technologies or start their own group ... 

Apple really wasn't the fist one with a smartphone, it was this monster from the IBM Frakenstein laboratories ... 

Well, again, even when compared to other big tech companies like MS and Google, Apple's R&D spendings can't be described as "non-existent", and all of them spend less than Samsung....

The sum of component manufacturers budget dwarfs MS and Google too, so why is this only relevant to Apple?

But let's leave it at that because we are back to square one.

 

Apple was the first one with a smartphone that almost everyone on the planet wants to have it, or have something similar to it. I am aware of previous smartphones but they weren't nearly as popular or impactful. Whatever smartphone you use, it's largely, if not completely, influenced by the iPhone. For a lot of people, the current smartphone is the device they use the most on a daily basis. I couldn't have said any of that a decade ago.

I'd understand if we were having this conversation when the iPhone was in its early days. After all, even Steve Balmar didn't grasp Apple's vision for the device, which is a big reason they are still so behind in the smartphone game right now. Fortunately for Google, the story is different. But it's not the early days of the iPhone, so I am really baffled that you still question Apple's vision for the smartphone when its effect can be seen everywhere.