How much has Apple spent on the most ambitious product - Apple Vision Pro?

Meta has spent ~$55B on its Oculus/Quest line since 2021, including R&D, hardware, marketing, software, device subsidies, hardware, M&A.

Apple doesn’t have product-specific P&Ls, with its investments in displays, silicon, precision manufacturing, etc., applying across nearly all its products

But since development began ~2018, Apple has filed 12,300 patents in the US and spent $97B on R&D.

Apple says over 5000 patents were filed for Vision. Unclear if counting duplicates for each country, but if its unique patents, pro-rata would mean $40B in Vision R&D.

Costs are so extraordinary because they span so many different advances (optics, projection, tracking, foveation, charging, battery) and components (dozen cameras, sensors for face scanning and environmental detection) and manufacturing techniques (glass) well beyond precedent.

Apple's annual R&D budget is nearly 2x Meta's annual Reality Labs spend - plausible Apple's XR allocation is close to Meta's - yet less than 7% of Apple's overall revenues.

Again, patent allocation may overestimate R&D on XR. But it may also underestimate it as there's more pioneering research in XR than say, tablets or macs

Further, the 5000 patents figure was specific to Vision - not other XR-related R&D, such as this Dec 2022 filing.

Which was for "Self-Mixing Interferometry" for a “Sensor-based Gesture System”, with applications covering solo or multi-ring use, with or without Apple Pencil, supporting AR, VR and MR.

Pro-rata isn’t the best way to estimate share of total R&D, but even if you haircut a third, you reach $27B.

The $55B figure on the Quest/Oculus line is really $55B spent on Reality Labs, which is thus far concentrated on these headsets, but spans other projects (e.g. CTRL-Labs) and forthcoming devices (as does Apple's R&D).