Thursday Apple Rumors: Apple Spends $11.6M Per Day on R&D

Advertisement

daily apple rumors AAPLHere are your Apple rumors and AAPL news items for today:

Increased: Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) spent $2.1 billion on research and development during the first two quarters of its current fiscal year, ZDNet notes. That comes to 2% of its sales during the period, or $11.6 million each day. During the same time last year, the company spent $1.6 billion on R&D. The company is expected to spend more than $4 billion on product development this year. Some of the money is going to develop its upcoming iPhone 5S and iPad 5, which are expected to be released in the fall. It is also reportedly working on an upgrade to iOS. Other potential sources of R&D spending could include a larger-screen iPhone, a high-tech wristwatch and the much-anticipated Apple-branded TV set.

No Go?: Details in Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ:QCOM) recent quarterly results could spell bad news for a lower-cost iPhone, Forbes notes. A growing number of analyst expect Apple to release a cheaper iPhone aimed at competing with other smartphone rivals in emerging markets. But Qualcomm’s report suggests that those markets may already be saturated with low-cost smartphones from regional manufacturers, who are operating on a 60-day time to launch framework. That compares to a traditional time to launch period of nine months to a year for Apple. Moreover, Qualcomm’s data indicates that smartphone prices in emerging markets are dropping rapidly with increased competition, potentially pricing Apple’s phone out of the market. The company has already said it won’t produce a $99 iPhone and most analysts expect a low-cost iPhone to be priced at between $300 and $400.

Unexpected Title: After reviewing data from 150,000 laptops, PC services provider Soluto has declared a MacBook Pro the “best performing Windows laptop,” AppleInsider notes. In its analysis, Soluto examined boot-up times, application crashes and computer freezes to determine which laptops handled Microsoft‘s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows OS the best. Surprisingly, a mid-2012, 13-inch MacBook Pro received the best score, despite the fact that the machine is not designed to run Windows. A 15-inch MacBook Pro took sixth place. The MacBooks had the best reliability among the tested machines, but were also the highest priced. The report noted that Windows installations on MacBook Pros did not come with “bloatware” commonly added by manufacturers to Windows-specific computers, which may have helped their performance.

For more about the company, check out our previous Apple Rumors stories.


Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2013/04/thursday-apple-rumors-apple-spends-11-6m-per-day-on-rd/.

©2024 InvestorPlace Media, LLC