I should have addressed this. This thread is about the capital costs of getting to the first sale, so that's model training for an LLM vs all the R&D in an iPhone.

Recent iPhones use Apple's own custom silicon for a number of components, and are generally vastly more complex. The estimates I have seen for iPhone 1 development range from $150 million to $2.5 billion. Even adjusting for inflation, a current iPhone generation costs more than the older versions.

And it absolutely makes sense for Apple to spend more in total to develop successive generations, because they have less overall product risk and larger scale to recoup.