this pretty much counts as hearsay, but (from a MacNN article quoting a Gilder report), if this is accurate, a fascinating set of relative R&D and dev expenditures: "Apple, with a fifth of Dell's revenues spends about as much on R&D every year as Dell does, translating to 5 to 8 percent of sales as opposed to Dell's relentless 1.5 percent a year. Not that Apple's R&D has been inefficient. Apple's new operating system, OS X, costs two orders of magnitude less to create than the latest Redmond release." it actually surprises me that Dell spends as much on R&D as Apple. and it's pretty stunning if OS X really cost 1/100 of what WinXP did to develop.