And I don't think they acquired Liquidmetal the company, they only signed a deal for Consumer electronics exclusive use up to a period of time, and my guess was LiquidMetal were too expensive and they could not figure out a way to hit High Volume Production.
Although I generally do agree Apple pays bottom dollar for acquisitions. One reason why I am not hopeful of them buying the Intel Modem business along with all the 3G - 5G Patents.
But if you want to buy a business that makes a lot of money, you'll be hard pressed to find one if you only look at small companies on the cusp of bankruptcy.
Siri had limited value as a standalone app interfacing only to public APIs and services, but huge value as a deeply integrated platform interface with links into all the platform services. The original company could never realise that sort of enhanced value, so as a standalone player it's value was limited and Apple could buy it (relatively) cheap.
PA Semi as a small independent chip designer could eke out a decent living doing small bespoke designs for companies here or there. That has value, but it's limited. However as the designers of the undisputed heavyweight champion mobile CPUs, in the most successful consumer product of all time, providing significant product differentiating performance and features, they have enormous value but _only_ if Apple buys them.
User ksec gave a great list of successful Apple acquisitions for which their core products still exist and are thriving and the above pattern applies just as well to all of them. That's the primary model for Apple. I'm sure there are cases where they buy teams for talent, but it's usually talent in a specific area Apple can directly leverage somewhere in their products.
EDIT: I would into be at all surprised if Apple went into these negotiations saying "We love your technology, it;s great. Here's an offer. BTW here's the brochure of another similar company with almost as good technology we could buy instead, integrate into our products and kill you with.".
Not always, Beats headphones was them buying a company producing complimentary products, most of the value was in the brand, marketing and the distinct visual design of the products. There's nothing special about the technology and the company was very effective in bringing their product to market.
“'You either got Chill Steve or Very Mean Steve': Dropbox founder remembers being summoned to Apple by Steve Jobs — then told his startup would be killed”
https://www.businessinsider.com/drew-houston-dropbox-steve-j...
Yes in terms of raw $, you are right. As it's meant to be read (profitable and stable? within that industry).
Alice wishes to buy a house. She narrows her choice down to three candidates, and is looking to pay the lowest possible price for one of the three.
Bob has a house for sale. After showing it for a week, his agent puts it up for offers, and he is looking to accept the highest possible price.
If Bob's highest possible price is also Alice's lows possible price, they both win.
So it is very possible for one party to sell for the highest possible price, while the other party is buying for the lowest possible price, even if both have the same information about the market.
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So yes, Apple could have paid the lowest possible price while simultaneously--and you would be correct--they sold for the highest possible price.
Apple is just more careful on their acquisitions.
It seems to be a victim of Google’s schizo approach to product in the sense that every 12 months it seems to be following a new strategy or launching a new product to replace an older one Id never used anyway. Their whole YouTube Red stuff, and YouTube Music, I have no idea what the long term strategy of this company is. Outside of ads of course.
And on the other side of ads, Google Analytics started as Urchin.
But indeed, not the rule.
I found the desktop app pretty useful in just identifying songs friends played when people were over, popular songs in commercials, and just popular songs that played when I lived abroad on tv. But as I thought about the security implications of apps like Alexa and Hey Google I eventually uninstalled it. Siri was always basically useless so I kept it off mostly for that reason.
I know, but they don't accept new customers ever since the acquisition. Apple recently added a screenshot/feedback function to TestFlight, which is just one of the many things BB could do. Anyway, I'm hoping TestFlight will become a full CI tool or otherwise, what was the point of this acquisition? However, it's been more than a year already...
Only when your a 'special person' do you get something competitive, but that applies to any company.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisit...
https://nofilmschool.com/2011/12/avid-apple-excerpt-timeline...
Apple has been filing its own patents for liquid metal alloys and technology since then. It's still a nascent area, but Apple has had a consistent broad thematic focus on materials science in R&D for the last ~7-8 years, so I'm not sure how one could reliably determine this licence to have not panned out.
As far as I know the only direct application of the technology we can see today remains the SIM-removal tool shipped with each iPhone.
Speaking of “bottom dollar,” how does Apple pay their engineers compared to other big tech?
Similarly for the key-value store FoundationDB.
They open-sourced that, and not in a "dump the baby on the community doorstep" kind of way. It's active:
https://www.foundationdb.org/blog/foundationdb-is-open-sourc...
In fact the only case I can remember when they didn't do this was with the liquid metal company, and that one didn't pan out. (there are presumably others but I don't recall any off the top of my head.).
They have bought a few products, like iTunes, without buying the company.