Apple looking to buy ARM ?

Yikes! Time to buy AAPL and ARM stock!

If Apple buys Arm its huge... Doesn't Intel have to pay ARM royalties?
 
The comments there seem pretty much like what you will read anywhere.


Apple could buy ARM, but I think it is extremely unlikely.
 
Wouldn't this be seen as anticompetitive?

Almost every smartphone in existence uses an ARM cpu.
 
What heatless said. Well, maybe it might, but it'd be a stretch. I don't want this to happen under any circumstance.
 
Yeah I'm seeing more and more articles debunking this rumor, thankfully. This would be very bad for the industry, and probably Apple too, IMHO. However one of the reasons everybody uses ARM is that they have always positioned themselves as kind of a neutral third party and don't try to compete with their licensees (oh yeah, and they also design really good CPU cores). That's why you have so many situations where fierce competitors are all licensing ARM cores for their SoC's (e.g. Apple vs HTC/Moto/Google). Having Apple buy ARM and turn them into a partisan player would essentially destroy their value in exchange for temporarily shaking up the industry while their competitors made plans to move to alternative architectures in the mid-to-long term. I say mid-to-long term because everyone has existing licensing agreements that would allow them to use ARM cores for the next several years anyway.
 
If this was any other company, I'd be skeptical.

But Apple has magic get-out-of-regulation-free kool-aid that will ensure that if they decide to acquire ARM, they will get ARM.
 
AVT said:
If this was any other company, I'd be skeptical.

But Apple has magic get-out-of-regulation-free kool-aid that will ensure that if they decide to acquire ARM, they will get ARM.
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No they won't because EVERYONE else will align against this deal, Google, Microsoft, HTC, Verizon, etc. Apple ain't that powerful. And there is public comment on these deals usually and I would suspect that would run HEAVILY against Apple. Yes Apple has been able to do what it want's with its OWN stuff, but this goes well beyond Apple's technology.

There's NO win for the consumer in this deal that I can see and much potential harm. How would allocation be protected so that Apple doesn't favor its own products over its competitors? It just doesn't fly that a super secret company like Apple could EVER be trusted not to screw its competitors if controled the source of the CPUs of a large part of the smartphone market. It so reeks of anti-trust violations its not even funny.

Honestly, besides Apple is there ANYONE thay wouldn't be opposed to this deal? HUGE hurdle to climb.
 
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While I agree it's still a big anti-trust issue, I think it's important to recognize that ARM is only an IP company. They don't, and never have, manufactured processors - or even designed them. They design a core, and companies like TI, ST, Samsung and so on license it for use in their processors. This is an order of magnitude less bad than them controlling actual facilities or companies producing hardware.

I'm not sure what the logic for Apple to acquire ARM would be anyway though. They've already purchased a company that designs ARM-based CPUs, and are apparently leveraging these folks to design ARM-based CPUs of their own. I could see them purchasing fabrication facilities to produce them, but there's no value in buying ARM itself, that would cost huge amounts of capital and gain them virtually nothing, the IP cores are already available to any comer for a much cheaper price than it would cost Apple to design themselves.
 
heatlesssun said:
No they won't because EVERYONE else will align against this deal, Google, Microsoft, HTC, Verizon, etc. Apple ain't that powerful. And there is public comment on these deals usually and I would suspect that would run HEAVILY against Apple. Yes Apple has been able to do what it want's with its OWN stuff, but this goes well beyond Apple's technology.

There's NO win for the consumer in this deal that I can see and much potential harm. How would allocation be protected so that Apple doesn't favor its own products over its competitors? It just doesn't fly that a super secret company like Apple could EVER be trusted not to screw its competitors if controled the source of the CPUs of a large part of the smartphone market. It so reeks of anti-trust violations its not even funny.

Honestly, besides Apple is there ANYONE thay wouldn't be opposed to this deal? HUGE hurdle to climb.
Click to expand...

And they're still Apple. No-one cares about the consumer or other companies - they will pass any and all regulation for the same reason Microsoft will fail any and all regulation - they are Apple.
 
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