Apple had their own research lab from 1986 to 1997. Steve Jobs closed it when he re-joined Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou...

And they were quite productive:

> Apple's ATG was the birthplace of Color QuickDraw, QuickTime, QuickTime VR, QuickDraw 3D, QuickRing, 3DMF the 3D metafile graphics format, ColorSync, HyperCard, Apple events, AppleScript, Apple's PlainTalk speech recognition software, Apple Data Detectors, the V-Twin software for indexing, storing, and searching text documents, Macintalk Pro Speech Synthesis, the Newton handwriting recognizer,[5] the component software technology leading to OpenDoc, MCF, HotSauce, Squeak, and the children's programming environment Cocoa (a trademark Apple later reused for its otherwise unrelated Cocoa application frameworks).

Here are some blog posts by ATG's Jim Miller giving some background on concepts such as Data Detectors.

https://www.miramontes.com/writing/