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giantrobot parent
Apple bought PA Semi a long time ago. They have a significant silicon development group. Their architecture license (they were an early investor in ARM) for ARM means they get to basically do whatever they want using the ARM ISA. The SoCs in pretty much all their devices are designed in-house.
ljosifov
Were they ARM investors at the time they needed CPU for Newton? Was that before or after e.g. iPaq PDA-s? And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way?

I remember iPaq PDA fondly. Wrote a demo to select a song from a playlist with few thousand author-album-song with voice query. The WiFi add-on was a big plastic "sleeve", that the iPaq slid into, not the other way around. Could run the ASR engine for about whole 10 mins before it drained the battery flat, haha. :-)

giantrobot OP
IIRC Apple originally invested in ARM during the development of the Newton. The original Newtons used ARM 610 CPUs. I don't know exactly when they sold their ARM stake but they kept their architecture license.

The Newton was long before the iPaq, the MessagePad was released in 1993.

ljosifov
On selling of the ARM stake - asked ChatGPT:

Q> And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way?

A> And yes. In the late-1990s turnaround, Apple sold down its ARM stake in multiple tranches after ARM’s 1998 IPO, realizing hundreds of millions of dollars that helped shore up finances (alongside the well-known $150 million Microsoft deal in Aug 1997).

skeezyboy
what about all the components and sensors
simonh
Apple has bought startups with various technologies like Anobit, that developed advanced flash memory controllers, and have funded development efforts by partners. For example Apple worked hand in glove with Sharp to develop the tech for their 5K display panels. They also now have their own cellular chip designs in some models, in their quest for independence from Qualcomm. That’s all from memory, I’m sure there are many more examples.
skeezyboy
so they didnt design all the components and sensors then

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