Intrinsity is hardly a "lifetime" of expertize, since the company was founded in 1997. Furthermore, it's a small and fabless semiconductor company, which only does R&D.
14 years is an eternity in semiconductors but we're digressing.
What you don't want to accept is that there is a difference between investments and operating expenses. Any accountant will tell you it's ridiculous to put them in the same box. It makes it impossible to access quarterly cost of running your business. Adding a one time, large cost to one particular quarter also doesn't make sense for something that's supposed to have benefits over a much longer term.
In the short term, the acquisition of Intrinsity has almost no benefits to Apple: they could simply have continued to pay whatever royalities they are paying. Over the longer term, however, there are distinct benefits: they are shutting down access for competitors to a high quality CPU core, they get total control over the roadmap, they don't have to pay royalties anymore and they maybe also can reallocate some engineers that had to support other companies with their own projects.
All those benefits play over a much longer term than just a quarter.
Surprising as it may sound, the goal of accounting is to make it possible to compare businesses (or the same business over time) with similar kinds of metrics. Throw everything on one pile, or worse, do it selectively and you get a mess that makes comparisons impossible.
All this was in the context of R&D expenses: as an investor, I want to be able to see a graph of R&D expenses over time. If you're going to add one time events like a $112M investment here or a $8B investment there, the graph is worthless.
NavTeq is the largest satelite-imaging company in the world, with their maps being used in 85% of all the GPS map softwares sold. It also does its own R&D (which, of course, appear in Nokia's total R&D expenses) but it's mainly an assets company. That's the way I see it, at least.
It's IP, no matter how you slice it. And it got devalued by a factor, only months after the acquisition by Nokia, the day Google decided to add navigation for free to Android. The timing by Nokia was just as bad as the timing of AMD when they decided to buy ATI.
The costs of R&D should be included when the payments are done. Doesn't it make sense..?
No, it doesn't make sense at all. You're trying to subvert centuries of accounting rules. Please pick up an accounting 101 book. This is something that's probably discussed in the first chapter.
If you pay $100M today for a state of the art lithography machine, do you honestly believe it's going to end up in the box for operating expenses? That machine will serve you well for, say, 4 years, so you're going account for it as a depreciating asset over that time. (BTW: if you don't, the IRS will probably have a good word with you.)
And why wouldn't Apple pay the 120 million upfront? They're sitting on an amount of cash reserves that is orders of magnitude higher than $100M.
Huh? Of course Apple made the payment right away. See lithography machine. The moment and the way you pay for something is completely orthogonal to the way you account for it.
