Comment by runako

Scale matters.

From TFA:

> pushed the company's market capitalization to $72.13 billion

This, on annual revenue of ~$19B.

Apple today is closing in on 2x that revenue every month now. Quarterly net profit exceeds annual revenue in 2006. The Apple Watch group is roughly half the size of the whole company in 2006.

At some point, it became clear that the business throws off vastly more cash than can be productively used in R&D (here I will note that Apple's recent profit gusher is already net of investments in things like the Titan car project, Vision, and all the other stuff they work on but never release).