http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/355891/stev ... cash-hoard

This is a man who thinks the iPad's magical - I'd have questions too

Well, for it's most likely going to do to the value of his stock portfolio it probably will be magic.
I do find it mildly entertaining that stock holders don't seem to have learned much about the value of having large cash reserves in the middle of a recession. I somehow don't think they can have done terribly badly out of their Apple shares over the last couple of years.
Th example of what can happen if you rely too much on (cheap) credit was abundantly demonstrated by the banks not so long ago.

They have actually looked remarkably sensible by holding cash. For years they were criticised for them. With the credit crunch it gave them a lot more leverage in deals. They have been able to stump up funds up front for deliveries of components and get better terms as well.

Do you think that they are saving up to buy Microsoft?

No more likely Adobe.

Maybe they are saving up to be able to buy Foxconn who make the iPhone, or HTC who make rival unix devices that support Flash as well as feature better components for less.

Mate of mine has a HTC HD2. It has this weird bug that it will send 3 (and only 3) SMS messages then will silently stop sending them i.e. they look like they've gone but they haven't, until you shut it down and restart it. He's tried all sorts of things to fix it; reflashing with the Vodaphone ROM, reflashing with the HTC 'vanilla' ROM.. can't seem to fix it. Bloody brilliant phone in lots of ways (the screen particularly is incredible), just doesn't actually work...

As to Apple buying HTC, that would be a waste of a phenomenal amount of money. Why buy a company that sells less of the same products than you do? Especially now with Google probably sourcing their phones elsewhere and WinMo becoming more and more of an irrelevance, HTC are looking less like the leading player than they were say six months ago.

If Apple should buy any company, what they should buy is any company that can make the phones they have faster. IMO smart phones & pad computers are about to enter a serious horsepower arms race. Proper 3D graphics on games, large high resolution screens, more rich media stuff needing better H264 decoding... right now a 1GHz CPU and fairly simple 3D acceleration is about the cutting edge, in six months I think you'll need a 2GHz CPU and PS2/original Xbox level of 3D performance to look even vaguely competitive. Sod buying HTC, Apple should buy Nvidia.

NVidia would be a logical choice. Also any company whose products could be used across the range. They could buy up a phone chip designer or even Qualcomm.

Why would Fiat buy Ferrari then? They may make sell fewer but they have access to better technology, have been in the game longer and can make far more powerful products.

The nexus one is made by HTC, as have most of the key android phones (the G1, magic, hero, the new one which is more powerful than the Nexus one all made by HTC)

Well they bought PA semiconductor so they could produce the chip for the iPad so I guess similar acquisitions aren't out of the question.
I guess the logical choice for a one-stop processor and 3D firm would be AMD. That seems somewhat unlikely though. It's too big for one thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if they went for ARM at some point though.

Apple rejected AMD because of the tech development tree. It might also come across problems with patent licensing agreements between AMD and Intel.

Nobody in the market for a Ferrari is also in the market for a Fiat. They simply aren't competitors. Apple and HTC are producing very similar products for essentially the same people.


There's nothing to keep Google paying HTC for hardware and most of the big mobile manufacturers are on the verge of launching Android-powered handsets. Google could drop HTC for someone else any time they liked and HTC couldn't do a thing about it.

Jon