Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
-- Steve Jobs, Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998
Most of Apple's innovations are not publishable as science papers. In contrast, IBMs innovations are routinely of publishable kind. Microsoft, HP, and Google also do a lot of "hard" computer science or engineering work.
Apple's UI and integration innovations not nearly in the same class as those of the others. That's not to say Apple doesn't help society, or that it's not creative. But it's certainly not doing the same type of work as the others. In fact, many of the technologies that Apple has purchased, such as Siri, would not exist without lots of funding into solving the harder problems.
IBM do invest in pure science with the expectation that something out there bring a totally new field or technology, Apple does not.
The transistor was invented in one of those large R&D units, Bell Labs from AT&T, maybe it did not brought money as the Mac or the iPhone but it was real innovation, you could always argue that it was all about people but I think without AT&T money it would have appeared much later in history.
