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Perhaps they spend slightly less than others, but what interests me is that there is an exponential growth of R&D spending over the last five years with no real innovation (in my opinion, since the iPhone). And Microsoft has been spending consistently around 15% of their revenue on R&D. For what? Higher pixel density and an OS with tiles that can be swiped on touch screens? Is R&D really that low ROI? We're talking about tens of billions of dollars here.

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In a lot of cases, you won't notice the result of every dollar spent on R&D (until much later on, when the technology becomes mainstream). For e.g. siri: might just seem like voice-to-text to you, but there's probably a ton of stuff happening in the backend in the fields of ai, scalability, personalization of the results, etc. Some of this stuff might have been known problems with known solutions, other things might have been applied research.

Remember that Apple is releasing a new product category in 2014; the R&D for that has been paid over the last few years.

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