Report: Apple to Buy Flash Memory Company for $500 Million
You know how the song goes! "All I want for Christmas is my own flash memory company..."
It looks like Apple may be preparing to use a small portion of its billions to acquire another company. According to the latest reports, Apple is reportedly gearing up to purchase an Israeli fabless semiconductor company that specializes in streamlining flash memory.
Israel's Calcalist reports that Apple is in talks to buy Israel-based Anobit for $400 million to $500 million. According to the Hebrew website, the company's chips are already integrated into some of Apple's biggest products, including the iPhone, the iPad and the MacBook Air. Anobit uses a unique signal processing technology called Memory Signal Processing, which is said to significantly improve endurance and performance while cutting down on the cost of flash storage. Apple apparently wants to buy the company so it can boost memory and improve memory reliability on its devices.
If the deal goes through, it will join the very small number of hardware companies that Apple has acquired over the year. So far, this list includes just four other companies: NeXT, Raycer Graphics, Intrinsity and P.A. Semi.

As an investor that must make you wonder how long that iBonanza is going to last !
I, for one, have the feeling that in say 5 years from now Apple may easily have fallen back to where they used to be; a provider of design over content for the iCrowd with more money than brains.
Don't get me wrong. This is not Apple bashing. It is simply a statement that Apple is about as over hyped at the moment as the Florida real estate market was a few years ago. Windows is an overblown piece of junk code, but they do have a market share that all the iPads in the world can not topple.
Mac OS X and Linux are both unix-like systems (Mac OS X is actually Unix certified), but that's where the relationship ends. They are entirely separate developments.
The Mac OS X kernel (XNU) even predates Linux by 2 years.
Oh and the convicted monopolist MS isn't.
Thank you for correcting the ill informed.
Apple distrusts other companies and hates to partner/rely on them - it will only do so until it has the resources or ability to acquire its partners or (more likely) a smaller competitor. Or some other outcome where Apple has more control over the products' design or manufacture - say, a patent of some sort.
When it was revealed that Apple patented an embedded SIM card capable of connecting with multiple carriers, it was obvious that Apple would either buy a telecom or act as a middle-man between the iPhone users and all other telecoms (which would facilitate an eventual switch to an Apple branded carrier) simply because of Apple's conflicting philosophies with existing cellular carriers (or the regulations that govern them).
It's only a matter of time before Apple is fully vertically integrated. The only question then would be if Apple will be allowed to do this. I'm guessing they would be, as they work hard to keep from capturing too much market share, generally protecting them from Anti-Trust and Monopoly laws. Hopefully I'm wrong about that.
mac OSX is based on NeXTSTEP which is partially based on the popular FreeBSD
It's true that linux and xnu are completely different kernels. But this doesn't mean that the XNU doesn't use quite a lot of code from other sources. Before NextSTEP was acquired by Apple the XNU had tons of code from the Mach kernel 2.5 and BSD. Now the XNU uses the code from the Mach kernel 3.0 and freebsd.
Apple would lose trying to challenge Samsung in court over memory patents. Samsung holds patents of their own....as does Rambus, Micron, Kingston, Hynix...... I'm sure Rambus would love the opportunity to go after Apple for patent infringement.