Apple's Expanded Presence in Israel Focused on Chip Design
Following Apple CEO Tim Cook's visit to Israel this week, the company's increasing interest in the country is said to relate to chip design, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Apple recently opened new research and development offices in Israel north of Tel Aviv, with the facilities serving as the iPhone maker's second-largest R&D operations outside of the United States.
“Apple’s Israeli acquisitions and its expanding local workforce show that the company is becoming more and more independent on the chip level, where it once had to rely on external suppliers,” said Shlomo Gradman, chairman of the Israeli Semiconductor Club.
Apple may be looking to increase development of chips internally to the costs associated with relying on third-party suppliers, although it still relies heavily on vendors such as Samsung to produce chips for iPhones. Apple has acquired two Israel-based microprocessor chip design firms in Anobit Technologies and PrimeSense in recent years, and also hired several Texas Instrument engineers in Israel after the company announced some 250 job cuts at its Ra'anana offices.
Apple vice president of hardware technologies Johny Srouji is an Israeli Arab that grew up in Haifa and earned both a bachelor's and master's degree in Computer Science from Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology. Srouji joined Apple in 2008 and oversees custom silicon architecture and development covering several devices and technologies. Apple has over 700 other employees working directly for the company in Israel.
“We’ve hired our first individual in Israel in 2011 and we now have over 700 people working in Israel directly for us,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in the meeting with Israeli president Reuven Rivlin on Wednesday. “Israel and Apple have gotten much closer together over the last three years than ever before, and we see that as just the beginning,” he added.
Apple has job listings in Israel for a number of chip-related positions in the fields of silicon and semiconductor design, testing and engineering. The company has also been hiring staff to work at its chip design center in Haifa over the past three years. Google, Facebook, IBM, HP and hundreds of other international companies have also setup R&D centers in Israel, often following acquisitions of local companies.
Popular Stories
The iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are three months away, and there are plenty of rumors about the devices.
Below, we recap key changes rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro models as of June 2025:Aluminum frame: iPhone 17 Pro models are rumored to have an aluminum frame, whereas the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro models have a titanium frame, and the iPhone X through iPhone 14 Pro have a...
iPadOS 26 allows iPads to function much more like Macs, with a new app windowing system, a swipe-down menu bar at the top of the screen, and more. However, Apple has stopped short of allowing iPads to run macOS, and it has now explained why.
In an interview this week with Swiss tech journalist Rafael Zeier, Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi said that iPadOS 26's new Mac-like ...
Apple's iPhone development roadmap runs several years into the future and the company is continually working with suppliers on several successive iPhone models simultaneously, which is why we often get rumored features months ahead of launch. The iPhone 17 series is no different, and we already have a good idea of what to expect from Apple's 2025 smartphone lineup.
If you skipped the iPhone...
Alongside WWDC this week, Logitech announced notable new accessories for the iPad and Apple Vision Pro.
The Logitech Muse is a spatially-tracked stylus developed for use with the Apple Vision Pro. Introduced during the WWDC 2025 keynote address, Muse is intended to support the next generation of spatial computing workflows enabled by visionOS 26. The device incorporates six degrees of...
With iOS 26, Apple has introduced some major changes to the iPhone experience, headlined by the new Liquid Glass redesign that's available across all compatible devices. However, several of the update's features are exclusive to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 models, since they rely on Apple Intelligence.
The following features are powered by on-device large language models and machine...
Apple this week announced that iPhone users will soon be able to watch videos right on the CarPlay screen in supported vehicles.
iPhone users will be able to wirelessly stream videos to the CarPlay screen using AirPlay, according to Apple. For safety reasons, video playback will only be available when the vehicle is parked, to prevent distracted driving. The connected iPhone will be able to...
iOS 26 features a whole new design material that Apple calls Liquid Glass, with a focus on transparency that lets the content on your display shine through the controls. If you're not a fan of the look, or are having trouble with readability, there is a step that you can take to make things more opaque without entirely losing out on the new look.
Apple has multiple Accessibility options that ...
Apple today provided developers with a revised version of the first iOS 26 beta for testing purposes. The update is only available for the iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 models, so if you're running iOS 26 on an iPhone 14 or earlier, you won't see the revised beta.
Registered developers can download the new beta software through the Settings app on each device.
The revised beta addresses an...
Apple today added Mac Studio models with M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips to its online certified refurbished store in the United States, Canada, Japan, Singapore, and many European countries, for the first time since they were released in March.
As usual for refurbished Macs, prices are discounted by approximately 15% compared to the equivalent new models on Apple's online store. Note that Apple's ...