The R&D expenditure figures were published by the statistics website Statista. While Statista offered no breakdown on how the R&D budget was apportioned within the tech giant, Apple introduced a number of innovations to the iPhone 14 released this year, including satellite communications.
It is also reportedly working on innovations to the next iPhone that could include solid-state toggles instead of physical buttons, as well as a rumored AR/VR headset due out next year.
While Apple’s R&D expenditure would dwarf most companies, it is by no means the highest spending tech company when it comes to R&D, according to Statista. That title goes to Amazon, which spent nearly $43 billion in 2020 on R&D, or about 11 percent of its revenue.
As of 2021, Google's parent company Alphabet spent $31.5 billion on R&D across its many properties. In the same year Samsung’s R&D expenses stood at approximately 22.6 trillion South Korean won, equivalent to about $17 billion.
Meanwhile, among the top tech companies Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta spends the most relative to its revenue, spending $18.5 billion on R&D in 2020, amounting to 21 percent of its total revenue.