Apple Confirms Acquisition of Israeli Flash Memory Firm Anobit [Updated]

Pretty soon Apple is going to make all their components themselves.

Good move Apple.

I think this means that apple has a true desire to make all of their products flash based - and only flash based - in the coming years. Hopefully this will mean that we will start to see larger capacities at smaller prices, but I hope that Apple doesn't take a cue from the MB Air and start to install flash memory on the motherboard. Hopefully this isn't another step in Apple's attempt to make a machine that is completely closed for the user.

If I'm not mistaken, only the RAM is soldered to the motherboard on the current MBA and the SSD is still user replaceable.

You would think with the amount of cash they have, they would purchase more than just 'a few' small business'.

Why would they? Any acquisition has a huge cost beyond the money paid; the company has to be integrated, you have to make sure everything keeps running smoothly because you don't want the important people in the company jump ship, and so on. Apple is very careful only to buy companies that can directly contribute to improving Apple's business. And there are not many of them.

I gotta wonder how cheap the labor is in Israel to make this a good option.

Or maybe I'm missing something

You are missing something. What counts isn't how cheap the labour is in Israel, but how good their universities are.

This Israeli cool news.

No more Sammyflash

You are being naive. Anobit does not make flash and neither does Apple. Merge two companies not making flash memory and you get what? No flash memory. You need FABs for that and only Samsung has those (and spending $5..10 billion dollars annually to update those). Spending $500 million these days just buys you some patents and that's what this purchase is.

Heck, Microsoft itself was purchased from another company.

Mrs. Gates (Billy's mom) basically bought her trust fund baby a computer company that wrote the precursor to PC-DOS. Not only that, from her charity activities (she was from one of Seattle's oldest banking families), she knew someone who sat on IBM's board of directors and got Big Blue to look at Sonny Boy's operating system (which would eventually become the primary OS of the IBM PC).

Well, Junior took the ball and ran with it until the EU and US DOJ started poking around for antitrust practices. Mama Gates told Sonny Boy to loosen the purse strings, not be such a tightwad. By this time, he was wise enough to listen to Mom and she was the initial executive director of the Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates is a very important philanthropist, but let's not hide anything. Microsoft had a chance because his mom made some very strategic moves early in her son's professional endeavors.

That's not true.

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Unlike Google and Microsoft, they don't need to buy very many things out because they are creative. Microsoft, for instance, bought Office from another company. Google bought Motorola Mobility.[COLOR="#808080"]

Actually, Microsoft didn't buy Office.