Apple and Samsung Are Friendly Again, and the Competition Should Be Terrified

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-01/apple-and-samsung-are-friendly-again-and-the-competition-should-be-terrified

by adventured • 11 years ago

34 27 11 years ago

bloomberg.com

artmageddon• 11 years ago

I thought Samsung was already providing Apple with hardware for the iPhone?

egwynn• 11 years ago

I think the story is that they were, and then they weren’t, and now they will again.

agumonkey• 11 years ago

It's a weird love/hate relationship. The previous fallout seemed pretty bad, sued for Billions of dollar; yet business brought them back together. Mutual interest is a strong force.

ZeroGravitas• 11 years ago

They never stopped providing components to Apple.

Every few months for several years Apple-centric blogs announced (wit glee) that Apple had abandoned Samsung for the upcoming generation of it's mobile CPU (Samsung makes lots of other components for Apple, but the A-series chips were always the focus of these stories) but I think the most that happened was Samsung and other fabs splitting production on certain items, which is probably a good planning anyway when dealing with that size of project.

technological• 11 years ago

Now Samsung and GlobalFoundaries would be proving hardware to apple

bane8• 11 years ago

They are, but public perception is that there was a large falling out and some of the acquisitions moved to other vendors. But Samsung has still supplied the bulk of the hardware throughout. This is a piece to publicize that the nastiness is over and everybody can be overt about the relationship again.

enlightenedfool• 11 years ago

some one finally realized that Samsung and Android in general are not really a threat to Apple and its device business. They both got their own markets.

hyperpallium• 11 years ago

Android is also Apple's antitrust friend, just as Apple was for MS in another era. And a popular free operating system protects Apple from entrants (like Windows Phone) because it's hard to compete with free. Yet, it suits Apple because their focus is premium products and premium profits - they aren't suited to, and don't want to, cover low-end commodity markets. So there'd be a gap there anyway.

adventured• 11 years ago

As Jobs noted at the D5 conference (the interview with Gates), Apple's business doesn't work without Microsoft type companies. Those guys provide the lower 2/3 of the market, and Apple can be BMW / Porsche.

EwanG• 11 years ago

Wonder if it occurred to someone that Apple could simply buy Samsung...

bane8• 11 years ago

I don't think you understand how big Samsung is. Any fanciful acquisition notion is more likely to go the other way around and Apple would merely be one of the larger divisions of the conglomerate.

visakanv• 11 years ago

According to Forbes, Google's market capitalization currently stands at around $382 billion, while Samsung is currently worth $186 billion. That would enable Apple to buy, and shut down, two of its biggest rivals in the consumer electronics space.

– http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/11/what-you-could-buy-with-a...

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

After Apple, SanDisk’s biggest customer is Samsung, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Really this is just a 'short SanDisk' article :-) But more seriously, it is interesting when supply chains get squeezed down to a single supplier, it is an unstable configuration historically as the supplier inevitably feels they aren't getting enough of the value[1] which then disrupts overall supply.

I am also really surprised that Intel hasn't more aggressively stepped in here, seems like there is some margin for the bottom line they can pick up.

[1] In all economics you're at a good balance if the seller thinks you paid to little and you think you paid too much.

rdsnsca• 11 years ago

The only way Intel will get Apples business is to make ARM chips for it.

If you read the iPad chapter in Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, you would see that Intel was Jobs original pick for the iPad CPU. They fell out over a few issues, power consumption and control of the chip design being but two of them.

Apple and Samsung Are Friendly Again, and the Competition Should Be Terrified

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