Comparing Apple to Qualcomm, Facebook, and Google is a mistake.<p>Apple is a consumer electronics company. Typically consumer electronics companies don&#x27;t R&amp;D their components. iPhones use Qualcomm baseband chips. Apple does design some of their components, but that&#x27;s actually atypical for a consumer electronics company. Even then, Apple needs someone like TSMC to fabricate them.<p>So a lot of Apple&#x27;s revenue goes to buying components of companies that are spending a lot on R&amp;D. Qualcomm is making the components. They are doing the R&amp;D because they have to. TSMC is R&amp;Ding building 14 nm chips. Hynix is creating bigger NAND flash drives.<p>Google and Facebook are different because they sitting on monopolies that print money. They also do much more in house because it&#x27;s easier to.<p>Apple has some ability to use their size and existing products to capitalize on new technologies. But it&#x27;s probably better to just return their profits to their stockholders and let the market fund new R&amp;D.<p>Then again a lot of cool tech came from monopolies playing around excess profits (Bell Labs, Xerox, etc.).