Israel is home to some really talented people. Back when Intel was losing to AMD over half a decade ago, not in terms of market share, but in terms of performance of their products, it was Intel’s team in Israel that came out with Core architecture that put the company back on top. More recently Dan Shechtman (pictured above), who works at the Israel Institute of Technology, won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals. Apple wants some of those brilliant minds for themselves, at least according to the Israeli publication Globes, who says that Apple has “decided to open a development center in Israel focusing on semiconductors.” Aharon Aharon, who is described as “a veteran player in Israel’s high tech industry”, will be put in charge of this new office. It should be noted that it will be Apple’s first research and development center outside of Cupertino, California.
Now in related news, it’s also been widely reported that Apple is getting ready to blow as much as $500 million on an Israeli company called Anobit. Their specialties, according to TechCrunch, are “solutions designed to improve the speed, endurance and performance of flash storage systems while driving down the cost.” Anobit has over 20 patents under their belt, over 70 that are pending, and they employ roughly 200 people. According to Calcalist, another Israeli news publication, Apple uses Anobit’s products in the Phone, iPad, and MacBook Air.
Update: The Anobit deal is official.
Both of these news items reinforce Apple’s philosophy of taking complete control of their products. They want to be responsible for nearly every little thing that makes up their hardware. Steve Jobs was called a madman, a perfectionist, and an unrelenting asshole for the way he ran Apple, but look where it’s got them today. We don’t yet know how deep Apple wants to get into designing their own processor and memory subsystem, but this news makes us think that they’re aiming to pull a Qualcomm, meaning that they want to design their own ARM compatible processor instead of relying on off the shelf intellectual property.
[Image Credit: The official web site of the Nobel Prize]