[chipsy]

I'm with the camp that doesn't see an obvious strategic move here.

Acquiring ARM only for the chance at an end-to-end vertically integrated design seems quite expensive, albeit not beyond the "insanely great" motivations of Mr. Jobs.

It's true that ARM has a compelling and growing market share at the lower end, but continuing the licensing business seems un-Apple-like; at the same time, shutting that business down would only hurt competitors a little - it would mainly serve to make the other CPU makers rush in and try to capture the resulting power vacuum.

[argv_empty]

Acquiring ARM only for the chance at an end-to-end vertically integrated design seems quite expensive, albeit not beyond the "insanely great" motivations of Mr. Jobs.

Not beyond? I'd take that a step further and say that end-to-end vertically integrated design is very much a Steve Jobs sort of thing to attempt. He has said he thinks of Apple as a software company and, attributing it to Alan Kay, that "People that love software want to build their own hardware." That said, I'm not sure this would require total ownership of ARM -- just sufficiently large stake in it to exert some direction on its future development (sort of like sharing PowerPC with IBM and Motorola).