Yesterday there were rumors claiming that Apple is preparing to acquire an Israeli company called Anobit that specializes in the production of flash memories. 500 million dollars was the value of the alleged transaction that would take place and would give Apple its own laboratory where it could develop flash memories for iDevices. Leaving those rumors unconfirmed, today we find out that the head of Apple's R&D division, Dr. Edward H. Frank, is visiting Israel and now it is expected that Apple could open an R&D center there.
In a follow-up report to its Tuesday story claiming Apple was actively engaged in talks to buy Anobit, a fabless flash memory chip maker based in Israel for as much as half a billion dollars, Calcalist- a daily business newspaper published in Israel by the Yedioth Ahronoth Group which also publishes Yedioth Ahronoth, the country's most widely circulated newspaper – reports that Apple's senior research and development executive Dr. Edward H. Frank is touring the country to investigate the possibility of opening a development center there. Numerous Silicon Valley companies operate R&D centers in the country, including Intel, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Yahoo! and eBay, in addition to China-based Huawei.
Other large American companies have research and development centers in Israel, and Apple could join them in the near future, depending on how the negotiations with Anobit proceed. For Apple, the acquisition of such a company could prove to be an extremely important strategic move because the company could develop special hardware for its iDevices. Apple could make flash memories that would work as well as possible with iOS and the hardware of iDevices, and Macs should be a good example of the hardware + software combinations that Apple makes.
Of course, for now everything is purely theoretical, but we don't know what Apple has up its sleeve in the future.
