Yeah small M&A is great for advancing/derisking R&D for a given part or tech. They also embed / work closely with manufacturing partners. Nevertheless they're also doing a lot on their own R&D work; a bunch of Vision Pro stuff is homegrown and there's always new potential techs we never see that show up in patent applications showing their R&D is moving along at a healthy clip, e.g. this radar based tracking system from two days ago [1].
I think folks like Google and Meta talk a lot more about their R&D where Apple is very tight lipped, since part of Apple's magic is the part of R&D that's figuring out how to take janky half-working parts, polish them relentlessly, and combine the right ones together into something that makes sense as a product.
[1] https://www.patentlyapple.com/2024/04/apple-wins-patent-for-...
While Apple can do this, it isn't their typical mode of operation. For instance, they tend to accuhire companies specifically around getting an execution-oriented team for particular product areas, like developer tools (TestFlight) or weather (Dark Sky) or assistants (Siri).
This does mean building compelling product demos can determine how long a feature-under development can get extended.
> Foldables make sense for Apple to explore because even if it's ~5% likely to be able to be productized, the return is measured in the tens of billions.
Foldables make sense for Apple to explore also because even if foldable phones are a bad idea (and I kinda suspect they are), they make tons of other devices in different form factors which may have an entirely different set of trade-offs for flexible/foldable displays.