Israeli financial paper Calcalist reports Apple has thrown down some serious stacks to acquire Anobit, a flash memory firm. But the purported $US400-500 million (!) buyout isn’t just for any memory firm — Anobit says its memory’s faster and cheaper.
Anobit makes NAND memory, which is used in things like flash drives and — more importantly here — solid state drives like the ones in the MacBook Air. Flash has become crucial to just about every good and successful thing Apple sells — iPhone, iPad, Air, and the harddrives that’ll likely find their way into every single Mac in the near future. Its memory chips, 9to5Mac reports, use a proprietary signal processing technique that allows for cheaper production and faster operation. If Apple wants to push SSD into all of its computers, that’ll be a big, albeit expensively-achieved advantage — and hey, it’ll also make for a nice middle finger to Samsung, which has been supplying NAND memory to Apple. And battling it in court. Apple’s shopping spree in the Holy Land might allow it to get out of its strange relationship with Samsung altogether. Neither company has put forth an official notice about the deal, but a tweet from the Prime Minister’s office seems sound enough for us.
But for the rest of us, it shows that Apple is serious about spending that cash mountain — which should mean better devices to use. [Calcalist via 9to5Mac]