If you think Apple simply "took something off the shelf" and sold us iPhones at huge markups, you clearly know even less about R&D than I assumed. Cherry-picking examples like the Internet doesn't really prove your point: try comparing the amount of taxpayer-funded R&D that went into the early (pre-1994) Internet with the amount of private investment since then. (I have no idea what the actual numbers are but I'd guess at least two orders of magnitude difference based on what I've seen elsewhere.)
I don't disagree, but research money spent may be a poor proxy for technical progress if it's spent to research ever better ways of showing ads to consumers.
I mean, it'd make sense if the government research spending aligned with public interest more closely than private investment did, the government is spending the public's money after all.
Totally valid points - but this is why oversimplifying the entire issue into "Private sector bad! Public sector good!" (or vice-versa) is a terrible idea. However, oversimplifying what big companies like Apple do as pushing ads is just as bad. Think about the supply chains involved in building an iPhone, and how the individual components are manufactured - it's decades beyond the roots in government (and remember, projects like the Internet still depended on private companies to actually build most of the hardware).
