Apple&#x27;s major competitive edge right now is supply chain and economies of scale. They are able to source materials far better than basically anybody else. This has always been Tim Cook&#x27;s strong suite.<p>Another competitive edge is chip design. Apple&#x27;s A9x has a custom PowerVR implementation that blows its competitors out of the water in terms of power and efficiency. They seem to be consistently ahead in this regard.<p>Apple&#x27;s major R&amp;D investments right now are in Music, VR&#x2F;AR, and the car project. They&#x27;re working on some cool things in music that I can&#x27;t talk about, but IMO music is too small of a market with too small margins, and Apple is putting way too much effort into it. Apple has made some really good VR&#x2F;AR hires, but Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet have better teams. Who knows how the car project will turn out.<p>Apple is currently investing more in R&amp;D than they ever have before. This scares me because their successful projects have almost always been on the thin side investment wise. Apple has traditionally launched products with the bare minimum of features and built up from there. People hate them for it, but it works. I hope they&#x27;re not moving to a more monolithic model.<p>Lastly, Apple seems to have had a collapse in quality in the past year or so, especially with phones. This is anecdotal as I haven&#x27;t seen any actual data on it, but I know so many people who have gone through numerous iPhones (for the most part 6s&#x27;s and 6s Pluses) that have had one problem after another. I&#x27;ve been pretty lucky, but I have a 6, not a 6s. My previous 5s, however, barely lasted a year.