Clues That Apple's Bought Another Processor Design House 183
According to Ars Technica: "Apple's gigantic bankroll may be burning a hole in its pocket. Almost two years after purchasing PowerPC designer P.A. Semi, Apple appears to have snapped up ARM design house Intrinsity. According to a report that first appeared on electronista, a number of engineers at the company have indicated that they are now or soon will be employed by Apple. Some of them have even gone as far as to change their LinkedIn profiles, with one reverting it, possibly out of fear of drawing the wrath of his new, secretive employer." Updated 20100404 1:15 GMT Brian Dipert points out the earlier coverage at EDN, from which both of the above reports draw.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Mac vs. PC / iPhone vs. Cellphone (Score:1, Informative)
Sitting on a bus back from the airport the other night almost every person (across a wide age range) had a smartphone. 90% of them were iPhones.
Hm. Another piece of anecdotal evidence. But please, remember, the US isn't the world. The iPhone has a minuscule share of the world's mobile phone market. The only sense in which Apple "made" the smartphone market is by manipulating the tech press to redefine the smartphone as an iPhone. Remember the false dichotomy that Apple insisted existed between the Mac and the PC. More of the same. And so, by definition, the Mac is the best Mac, and the iPhone is the best iPhone.
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Informative)
Um...and when Apple released a tablet it was just an iPod touch with a bigger screen and some incremental os extensions (that also apply to the ipod).
Uh, did you happen to miss that Apple recreated the whole iWork suite with a completely different user interface targeted towards touch screens?
Digital Research (Score:1, Informative)
Digital Research, the company which made CP/M 86, that DOS was a clone of.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft started out with a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, and pretty much owned what is effectively the "operating system" for nearly all hobby architectures developed between 1975 and 1981, the year they got the DOS deal with IBM.
Apples? Applesoft Basic was written by Microsoft.
Comodores? Yeh. Microsoft Basic.
Ataris? Microsoft Basic.
Tandys? Microsoft Basic.
They dominated all the inexpensive CPU's with their Basic: Z-80, 6502, 8080, 6800, and 68000.
This is before the first Personal Computer (PC)
Microsoft is a software company and prior to Windows 3, they had products for nearly every desktop ecosystem. It was only after Windows 3 made them obscenely profitable that they started abandoning all the other ecosystems.