[sschueller]

How long until Apple does a hostile takeover? /s

I assume regulators would block a hostile takeover like they would a regular buyout if there are concerns regarding market power?

[senttoschool]

Why would Apple ever want to own ARM? Their internal CPU design team is years ahead of the ARM team. Apple has an architectural license and doesn't care about ARM core designs.

Quite honestly, ARM falling on its face hard is actually a benefit to Apple. That would mean that Apple Silicon and iPhone SoCs have less competition. Imagine if Qualcomm chips based on ARM designs are 5 years behind instead of the 2-3 years now.

But the Nvidia + ARM combo made sense from a technical and strategic standpoint though.

[klelatti]

> But the Nvidia + ARM combo made sense from a technical and strategic standpoint though.

Made sense for Nvidia. Not for other Arm customers.

[justin66]

...because seriously, how many of those customers could ever possibly want to use Nvidia's graphics or AI silicon? That stuff is never going to fly.

[Vogtinator]

> Their internal CPU design team is years ahead of the ARM team.

Was. They're now at Qualcomm.

[orlp]

> Why would Apple ever want to own ARM?

You answered your own question:

> Quite honestly, ARM falling on its face hard is actually a benefit to Apple. That would mean that Apple Silicon and iPhone SoCs have less competition.

[senttoschool]

No I didn't answer my own question because a hostile takeover of ARM can cost $70b and it doesn't guarantee that ARM would fall on its face after the acquisition because it has long-term contracts.

[orlp]

> a hostile takeover of ARM can cost $70b

Sure, but the question was "why would Apple want to own ARM", not "is it worth the cost?"

> it doesn't guarantee that ARM would fall on its face after the acquisition because it has long-term contracts

Having full control of the company would guarantee that as much as any other method could by a mirroring argument, as far as I can see.

[senttoschool]

Sure, what other imaginary ways for Apple to destroy the competition do you have? Maybe buy Samsung and destroy the Galaxy brand? Buy Google and destroy Android?

Let us know what other genius ways you can think of.

[tibbydudeza]

Why because afaik they have a master IP license in perpetuity to ARM designs and they can chop and change what they want - nothing is stopping them from diverging from ARM reference designs completely and retaining just the instruction set because it is useful to tool vendors and programmers.

[klelatti]

Ah, the Apple has a perpetual royalty free license meme. Almost certainly a myth.

Very, very unlikely anyone would get a perpetual license that covers all future products just because they were a founding shareholder.

I did some detective work on this a while ago for my newsletter (link in bio) from behind the paywall:

> … Apple and Acorn were paying royalty fees soon after they founded the company why should that change to grant Apple a royalty-free license at some point later?

[Havoc]

Aws seems more likely

[MikusR]

Apple with their special license couldn't care less about ARM.

[snvzz]

>special license

This idea that they have a special license keeps getting thrown about.

But nobody has ever been able to provide any proof or otherwise reference a believable source.

Until proven otherwise, it's a myth.