They have acquired quite a number of VR studios. And they were pretty far down the road in building their own SOCs before deciding to double down on their partnership with Qualcomm.
I don't think it's fair to compare Meta against companies like Apple when they have up until now been almost entirely a software company.
> They simply are burning way too much money for an R&D phase.
I mean they're still making money. Mark doesn't give a shit about short term stock movement, why would he care about the division that he believes is the future of the company and maybe society losing money?
But to put things in perspective, the entire R&D budget for the first iPhone was $250M, and I don't think it was highly optimized for cost.
10B is 40x higher. And this is an average year, for an unfinished product that did not even start from scratch (they started with the Occulus Rift, a pretty advanced prototype)
The way I think of this is if Apple had to invent the smartphone when only desktop and laptop computers existed. No dumbphones. No mp3 players. No other second rate smartphones. The budget would far exceed $250M if that was the case, since so many of those things had resulted in supply chains for commodity parts that could, worst case, be modified slightly to fit Apple's needs. (Not that they didn't invent anything in order to produce the iPhone -- IIRC the glass screen in particular was a new feature not seen on any device before. Also they did a lot of legwork themselves e.g. the anodized aluminum device body that came from previous work on ipod / macbook).
And I can't help but reflect back to 1987 when AAPL was 27 cents a share and Jobs (at NeXT) was expressing his concern for the massive (a million a month!) cash burn rate at NeXT.
Not sure why anybody is expecting it to be profitable at this stage in its lifecycle.