Apple must be cooking up some interesting products in its secret labs. The company spending on research and development totaled $2.9 billion for the third fiscal quarter that ended on July 1, rising 15% year-over-year compared to a revenue gain of 7% for the same period, reports the Wall Street Journal. This brought the tech giant’s R&D spending to $11.2 billion for the previous 12 months — about 5% of the company’s revenue for the period.
“Apple hasn’t expended a greater portion of its revenue on R&D on an annual basis since 2004—three years before the first iPhone launched,” notes the WSJ. “That suggests other big things on the horizon.”
Those “big things” certainly include augmented reality products (likely including AR glasses that work with an iPhone), self-driving car technology (though I’m still betting that the company has no plans for an Apple-branded car), as well as future iterations of Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and Apple TVs.
