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Comment by 7952 | Hacker News Reader

Apple sell hardware and Google sell ads, everything else is just semantics. They may be competitive in certain areas but they are making money in completely divergent ways. Companies like Google and Amazon are able to use the Chinese electronics contractors to get products to market without the huge amounts on R&D that Apple had to invest. That is only a threat to Apple if they are unable to make innovative new hardware that can't be replicated quickly.

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> without the huge amounts on R&D that Apple had to invest.

Which amounts are those?

I could look for links that prove my point but whats the point? That information is naturally opaque. I believe that R&D costs are likely to be lower because I see such a huge number of new devices coming from companies without the clout of Google or Android. If Google are spending amounts equivalent to Apple on the pixel they are doing something wrong.

Apple is vastly more efficient at R&D than google is, in part because Apple's products are so profitable, that it's R&D as a proportion of sales is "small".

Meanwhile, Apple is investing $10B this year in CapEx, and while a couple billion of that are for server farms, the new HQ and store upgrades, many billions are going into the equipment and tooling necessary to make Apple products.

People seem to think you just call fox con and say "I want 100 million mobile phones by monday!"

Apple's "R&D" includes the investment in being able to scale a manufacturing business to the point where it can sell twice as many devices as the previous year, for several years running.

This is under appreciated by people who look at no-sales devices like the google Nexus and claim that google is in the lead by some arbitrary criteria.

That is a false comparison. Google's business is to make money on ads, not hardware sales. The R&D at Google is for a completely different purpose and much harder to measure in terms of efficiency for an outsider.

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