Apple Buys Israeli Flash Manufacturer

Lucas123 writes "According to published reports Apple is plunking down up to $500 million to purchase solid-state drive start-up Anobit Technologies. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted about the deal congratulating Apple on its first acquisition in his country. Apple is planning to use the acquisition to set up to set up a semiconductor development center in Israel. Apple already uses NAND flash from Anobit in its iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air products, according to the reports."

Is this the trend?

[stanlyb]

First they just opened a new factory in Texas, now in Israel, both out of China (in case you did not read the fine print), so, is this the new trend now? No more "cheap" chips? Or maybe they are becoming too expensive? Or maybe Apple knows something that we don't? Like, China is friend no more.....

Re:Huh?

[derGoldstein]

Usually What's outsourced to China is anything that requires manual labor. If you need people to do it, and said people don't need to be engineers, then there's a good chance that you'd get the most bang for your buck in China.

This is quickly changing, however. Chinese companies are establishing themselves as brands, and they themselves are using up the workforce. The pendulum is starting to shift the other way -- Chinese companies are setting up "beachheads" in Europe, and are even outsourcing jobs to cheaper countries.

Re:Vertical Integration

[jandrese]

Poor bad block management causing slowdowns over time even if you have trim enabled. Also stuttering during write operations. It was a huge problem on the first generation Airs.