Synaptics Buys Key Apple Supplier

Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes Synaptics Inc., of touchpad fame, is acquiring Renesas SP Drivers Inc, a division of Japanese chipmaker Renesas Electronics Corp. Renesas SP is the exclusive supplier of Apple's display driver chips for the iPhone. While Synaptics is a major supplier of touchscreen technology to clients such as Samsung, they have not done business with Apple for some eight years. Characterized as 'thrilled' to be back in Apple's supply chain, Synaptics CEO, Rick Bergman, is quoted as saying, '... I don't believe they do any driver chips internally so that would really be an opportunity for us.'

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[Shag]

Of course he had to open his mouth and remind Apple of the opportunity for them to start doing driver chips in-house...

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[NatasRevol]

Or just buy the company and fire him.

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[BitZtream]

On the contrary, Apple will just start the process of making their own chips.

They've got the financials to buy the knowledge and experience they need to make their own.

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[Timothy Hartman]

No way. Apple left them for dead when they leaked new iPods. They can kiss Apple's business goodbye very soon unless they have something important patent wise that precludes them from doing so.

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[slashmydots]

You're right, they'll just stop making devices for 10 years while they develop a new chip from scratch. Oh wait, no, you're wrong.

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[BasilBrush]

Who's wrong? It took two years from Apple purchasing PA Semi to having their own CPU design in a shipping device.

But Synaptics won't be doing anything but bending over backwards to keep Apple happy. Even Samsung, who at the device level are constantly in a law-suit battle with Apple, at the chip level, Samsung plays like the good little supplier to Apple.

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[slashmydots]

That was just "a" chip and it actually sort of sucked. To be in a top of the line premium phone, you better have the world's greatest power efficiency and they'd be starting at the stone age compared to Nvidia, whoever makes A-series chips, whoever makes snapdragon CPUs, etc.

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[BasilBrush]

That was just "a" chip and it actually sort of sucked. To be in a top of the line premium phone

It didn't suck. It *was* the SOC for a top of the line premium phone.

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[Cenan]

My old HP laptop had the best touch pad I've ever come across, made by Synaptic. The beauty of it was that it had a designated area for scrolling and could be turned off completely with a button at the top. The software "driver/spyware" that came with the laptop though was shit, I agree, the touch pad worked just fine with standard drivers installed.

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[drinkypoo]

My old HP laptop had the best touch pad I've ever come across, made by Synaptic. [...] the touch pad worked just fine with standard drivers installed.

The single best feature of Synaptics touchpads today is rotary scrolling. You don't have to lift your finger and put it back down, you just go in circles instead of just following the side of the touch area. They also support pinch-zoom and rotation, and none of these features work without the official driver.

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[Cenan]

Hmm, I might have to look into that. The old laptop got scrapped by the repair shop (motherboard was fried, new parts unobtainable) and they sent me a new one. That touch pad sucks donkey balls (also Synaptic), but I never read the manual, just figured they did their usual thing and fucked up a good system in the name of $whatever.

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[drinkypoo]

Heh, it's crazy reading this as a Mac user - why on earth would you want to move in uncomfortable circles, or dedicate an area of the track pad to it?

Are you trolling, or is this just the usual mac user cognitive dissonance employed to self-justify their overpriced purchase? Two-finger scrolling is harder than circular scrolling. I've done both. It's very easy to have your scroll interpreted as some other gesture, like pinch or rotate.

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[drinkypoo]

Circular scrolling, on the other hand, implies either that there's no horizontal scrolling or that there is much opportunity for confusion between panning and scrolling.

No, it does no such thing. Unlike the mac, you have full configurability of the touchpad. You can create up to four edge scrolling zones and control their size. You can also disable rotary scrolling, if it confuses you. You can also have multiple-finger scroll/panning, if you want. So you can have the feature that you love so well on the mac with a synaptics touchpad on a PC, even though it's inferior to the other options. Get back to me when the mac touchpad has half as much configurability as Synaptics on

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[Luckyo]

Two fingers is "as good as you can get on a mac". You can get proper circular scrolling which is much better on PC. Try it sometime.

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[Luckyo]

But PC is not a Mac you dumbass.

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[Luckyo]

You miss out once you have to scroll more than a single length of track pad. After that, you have to interrupt the action and move fingers back up to start again, when on a circular scrolling trackpad you can just curve the motion of one finger and keep on scrolling.

There's also the factor of scrolling speed, where circular scrolling across large documents is many times, possibly an order of magnitude faster.

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Apple, as it happens, does. Their iDevices and recent trackpads mostly use BCM5976 controllers. Always a good sign, for a company whose core business is capacitive touch interface sensors, that Apple would go with a part from Broadcom, the 'Well, at least they aren't Realtek...' of the world, rather than touch their stuff.

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[jandrese]

Synaptics makes the worst touch pads, except for everybody else who makes touch pads for laptops. Synaptics is really the top of the shitheap that is PC touchpads these days.

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[The Snowman]

I've NEVER used a Synaptic touch pad that worked worth a shit... they are all terrible... and then you have to use their shitty drivers on top of it in Windows...meh, stay away.

In general they are VERY touchy. Typing on my laptop, not touching the touchpad, causes the mouse cursor to jump all over the place and sometimes even click. I always plug in a mouse and set the driver to disable the touchpad when a mouse is connected, which there normally is at either my home or work desk. I will even take my mouse

Sounds like a non story.

[mirix]

Some company bought a division of a company that makes an IC that apple uses. Wow.

Renesas is the merger of partial-spinoffs of semiconductor divisions from NEC, Hitachi, and Mistubishi, for people that don't recognize the brand.

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[fermion]

The story here might be that Apple is going to be looking for a new supplier. This has repercussions for investor in the sector.

meh

[chrish]

It would be significantly better news if Synaptics had bought whoever provides the Mac laptop touch pads and/or whoever creates the drivers for those. Then Windows laptops could start having good track pads.

I wonder if that's the reason for Windows 8 being touch-focused... an end-run around the terrible track pads infesting Windows laptops.

Seriously, the hardware in my IdeaPad 500 is great, except for the horrible, horrible track pad. And the Canadian Bilingual keyboard, but that's my fault for not paying e

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[drinkypoo]

I've got three laptops with touchpads, of them two have synaptics and one has alps. The alps is nothing to write home about, both synaptics are wonderful devices which are completely flush with the palm rest (a small sensory divot aside) and which have subtle texture to help you gauge your finger motion, as well as multitouch with support for rotation and zoom. I don't think that synaptics needs to buy anyone in order to put good touchpads in windows machines. They even support one, two, or three-finger tap