Can Apple Sustain its Growth?

Couple of days ago, Apple unveiled its financial results for the last quarter, reporting revenue of $5.26 billion and net quarterly profit of $770 million. Apple shipped 1,517,000 hardware units and 10,549,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 36 percent growth in Macs and 24 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter. If it was the most profitable March quarter in Apple’s history, the most impressive result was pointed out by Steve jobs "The Mac is clearly gaining market share, with sales growing 36 percent—more than three times the industry growth rate".
While Steve Jobs could speak about the current success of Apple, maintaining the steady state of Apple profitability is another story and recent information could bring new light concerning the sustainable development of Apple in the future. We can not be accused of not supporting Mac users and the community, but Apple might have problem to control its growth in a near future. The recent postponing of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard till October while it was expected during months to be introduced at the WWDC, a event dedicated to developers, illustrate one of the current weakness of Apple. while offering its own OS and hardware, Cupertino hardware and software R&D teams are rather small in comparison to other key players on the market. While Apple explain the delay for Leopard by the investment required to release the iPhone on time, we also think that the recently introduced Apple TV has required some serious R&D resource, and as Apple did not recruit any new stuff, it had to relocate members of its R&D teams. Without counting the development linked to the introduction of future Santa Rosa-based MB and MB Pro models, as the long expected update of the Mac mini, Cupertino R&D teams are simply too small to keep up with the release of new and innovative product. Recruiting now new talents would probably slow development even more, as skilled members will have to train new comers in the R&D departments. with Apple's policy to keep the highest secrecy level on its future projects, one can not expect Cupertino to outsource some of its R&D work. While motherboard design is carried out in collaboration with Intel and might require much less work than in the past on the Apple's side, it is still present and important as illustrated by the motherboard of the Mac Pro.
It is clear that Apple will stick as close as possible to Intel CPU roadmap to update its hardware models, but user should be prepared to see expected products to be further delayed in the future simply because Apple can not keep developing/updating/introducing new products at the current rate without investing heavily in R&D and hiring more resources. We should not be afraid of such slow down as it is the proof that Cupertino is not following the "quick and dirty" policy so often used by computer companies in the past, and still today.
PS: If Apple needs help for speeding up OS X 10.5 localization into French they know how to contact us; we are ready to help (even sign NDA)