Apple confirmed yesterday that it has acquired Israeli flash storage startup Anobit in December. However, in typical Apple fashion they declined to reveal the price of acquisition (rumoured to be $390 – $500 million). You might wonder what the big deal is about this transaction. In my opinion it is to compliment Apple’s efforts in using flash memory on their products. Apple told the press that “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Apple’s most popular products (iPhone, iPad, iPod and a few MacBook Air’s) all use flash memory to store content (Music, Apps, Documents, email etc).
Anobit has produced two generations of Genesis SSD technology. The intellectual property that sets it apart from other SSD manufacturers is a controller that uses firmware called Memory Signal Processing (MSP), a type of ECC.
It seems that Apple became aware of the Israeli company (having already incorporated their technology in Apple products) and swooped in quickly to acquire the company before any of their rivals did. Apple’s previous acquisition Siri became an integral part of the iPhone and I expect the same for Anobit.
This can definitely be seen as a talent acquisition as 75% of the staff from Anobit are engineers. They will join Apple’s engineers (reportedly a 1000 in total) designing their latest chips etc. Due to the competitive nature of consumer electronics, even popular companies like Apple are struggling to find top talent. This acquisition is also the first that Tim Cook has done since taking over as CEO of Apple. The question is now; how does Apple’s opposition respond to this acquisition?
