https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-negroponte by Nicholas Negroponte

And one of the greatest things they'll look back on will be vapid, posturing articles like this one, by someone fully entitled by their vast privilege to actually pursue big, hard, long-term problems of basic research, but chose instead to bang on about why noone was doing it. The whole thing to me resembles that famous Monty Python sketch.

Negroponte has many flaws, and since i had a buddy who worked for him at the Architecture machine back in 76, it would be humorous to recount those. But he does make some good points like Apple is so secretive that nothing, not even new products they desperately need, seem to be able to escape the final committee that is so afraid of failure or being considered lacking in creativity they withhold all new products (and even stall updating existing ones, like the Mac Pro which is now 6 years without an update! imagine if Samsung sat on their Galaxy flagship for 6 years what would have happened?). But his assertion that government research is dwindling is not factual. Governments across the world are funding universities to the highest level in history, but because of the peer review system which has been corrupted, only projects that are sympathetic to the existing staffers on the committees that award funding get funded, and so breakthrough ideas are left unfunded. I have an old saying, "you get what you finance". If you stimulate mini-malls with tax credits, you will fill your country with those. In the case of physics research, we have seen over 20 years of suppression of LENR (aka cold fusion) research, instead continuing to dump billions into completely unworkable hot fusion projects which has been 30 years away from working, for the last 50 years... Thankfully in computers we haven't been dependent that much on govt and academic funding. In the computer area, Academia has produced so little of value for the last 10 years, i can't think of a single language like Pascal or Modula-2 that Prof. Wirth's small group produced, that i have been able to profitably use. If you tabulate the major breakthroughs of computer software, they are invariably the result of private companies' research, whether it be Xerox, or Visicalc, Lotus 123, etc.

"Governments across the world are funding universities to the highest level in history" Well, "The percent of U.S. GDP spent on federally funded research and development annually has been stagnant or dropping for 40 years" - http://theconversation.com/with-federal-funding-for-science-on-the-decline-whats-the-role-of-a-profit-motive-in-research-93322 - so I wonder if you have adjusted for population growth. I do marvel at the enormous salary of my former supervisor at the university, who was basically an old mathematician masquerading as a computer scientist, a man whose papers are incomprehensible to those not well versed in category theory, and whose skill at communicating with non-mathematicians like me was almost nonexistent in both directions (listening and speaking). Due to a new transparency law I saw that they paid him $168,000 CAD ... why exactly?

Given his current status, Negroponte could easily set up and fund a lab addressing the actually relevant fundamental research problems if he were so inclined. Nothing obliges Apple, under the current conventions of capitalism, to do anything other than maximise its shareholder value so there's absolutely nothing anomalous in its behaviour. As you say, we should be grateful that many private companies have accidentally ended up disseminating breakthroughs of benefit to society.

I don't think it's so easy, I've heard Alan Kay and Bret Victor say how hard it is to get funding for long term research

Any statistics you see about the decline of funding are put out by the people seeking funding, and as Mark Twain pointed out there are Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. The Universities have increased tuition 20x the rate of salary growth (an unsustainable path), the total amount of student debt is so alarming it isn't funny. Administrators of various colleges like Michigan State fly on private jets to pick up their donations, and almost every major magnet city is based around universities across the globe. Mr. Piepgrass' point about his professor making a great salary while publishing incomprehensible papers is all too common today. We don't need free college, we need cheaper college, and there is a lot of fat to trim in the universities. Long term research has traditionally only been funded by fat market leaders like Bell Labs,IBM, Xerox, Microsoft. Schools don't engage in long term research; they are limited to the time spans of the master and PhD student project lengths, so they do basically 2-4 year projects. Finally after a decade of pouring money into MS research, they came up with the hololens, which is a winning product, and we all know that it will be used extensively in 20 years. Just for medicine alone it is a gigantic breakthrough that is going to change things at a fundamental level. One other thing i should mention is that the federal research dollars are not spread around evenly, the top 20 universities basically take it all. I don't know what goes on inside Google or Apple. They clearly have a lot going on, and Google commendably at least tries to launch various of their more esoteric projects, unlike Apple, which is dominated by fear of embarrassment and failure and basically suppresses release of most of their wacky ideas. Apple makes great products, but let's face it they are a very unusual company.