Apple Inks New Deal With Arm For Chip Technology That 'Extends Beyond 2040' (reuters.com) 31
According to Arm's IPO documents, Apple has signed a new deal with the chipmaker for technology that "extends beyond 2040." Reuters reports: Arm unveiled pricing on Tuesday for what it hopes will be a $52 billion initial public offering, which would be the largest such deal in the U.S. this year. Arm owner SoftBank plans to offer 95.5 million American depository shares of the United Kingdom-based company for $47 to $51 apiece, Arm said in a filing. Arm owns the intellectual property behind the computing architecture for most of the world's smartphones, which it licenses to Apple and many others. Apple uses Arm's technology in the processes of designing its own custom chips for its iPhones, iPads and Macs.
The two companies have a long history -- Apple was one of the initial companies that partnered to found the firm in 1990, before the release of its "Newton" handheld computer in 1993, which used an Arm-based processor chip. The Newton flopped, but Arm went on to become dominant in mobile phone chips because of its low power consumption, which helps batteries last longer. The deal disclosed on Tuesday was not mentioned in Arm's previous IPO filing documents made public on Aug. 21, implying that the deal was signed between then and Sept. 5.
The two companies have a long history -- Apple was one of the initial companies that partnered to found the firm in 1990, before the release of its "Newton" handheld computer in 1993, which used an Arm-based processor chip. The Newton flopped, but Arm went on to become dominant in mobile phone chips because of its low power consumption, which helps batteries last longer. The deal disclosed on Tuesday was not mentioned in Arm's previous IPO filing documents made public on Aug. 21, implying that the deal was signed between then and Sept. 5.
Welcome To The ARMPit. (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder what odors will come?
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Imagine associating your user name with a post like this.
Re:Welcome To The ARMPit. (Score:4, Funny)
News Alert! I did. Karma be damned.
Legitimate investing is for rich folks (Score:2)
Arm owner SoftBank plans to offer 95.5 million American depository shares of the United Kingdom-based company for $47 to $51 apiece.
So, if I buy a share and by some miracle it doubles in value, I can sell it and have dinner for two at Outback? Neat.
Now you know why average income folks fall for crypto investment scams. The traditional stock market only pays well if you get exceptionally lucky or already start with a big fat pile of totally not the rent money cash to play around with.
Re:Legitimate investing is for rich folks (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, you won't be buying at that price even if you had the investment capital laying about, unless you are one of the big fat pile of totally not the rent money cash - in most IPOs the vast majority of the shares being sold when the market opens are already spoken for by various banks and institutional investors that already worked that shit out weeks ago when "underwriting" the IPO. Then they sell them on the open market to the second-wave investors like you and I and get a paltry 10+ digit profit.
You would be buying from either them, or employees and early investors with vested pre-IPO single-dollar priced options that are exercising them and getting rich in the frenzy; and you would be buying at whatever the market price is at that moment while it either craters as all those employees and investors dump all their shit on the market at once - if demand outstrips the dump, then the price goes wild as the outstanding shares are grabbed and scarcity kicks in, causing the graph to go up and to the right.
If demand lags the amount dumped on the market, the price plummets and long-play value investors and short sellers start buying it up and creating a support level. See: Etsy; opened at $16, rose to $27, then cratered to $10 where it found support.
In all scenarios, the hedge fund assholes and shorts get richer and move on to fuck some other company's stock price up.
And because share volume is up, all the high-frequency assholes at the Too Big To Fail crowd make off like bandits with a couple hundred million arbitrage plays in between the brokerage clearance fees and underwriting the IPO to begin with.
And at the end of it all, the company now has a lot more regulation to deal with from the SEC, a freshly minted billionaire founder, freshly minted millionaire managers and directors, and a nice chunk of capital with which to come up with what the hell they're going to tell their brand new public investors every 3 months from now until they ride the golden parachute off the roof.
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The outback isn't a great place to go for a meal. It's essentially a large, empty desert. Stick to the rivers and the beaches you're used to.
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My dad bought Apple at $14/share in 1998. Three weeks later, Steve Jobs announced the iMac.
My niece and nephew can now go to college at any school that they get accepted to without having to worry about financing. The remainder went to buying a couple of rental properties so that they could continue to write off mortgage interest while someone else pays the principal on the loans via rent. And it's not like he's some rich high finance guy - he's a part-time accountant at a grass seed farm after retiring
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If you're paying $50 per person at an Outback, you're doing steak very wrong.
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So, if I buy a share and by some miracle it doubles in value, I can sell it and have dinner for two at Outback? Neat.
Now you know why average income folks fall for crypto investment scams. The traditional stock market only pays well if you get exceptionally lucky or already start with a big fat pile of totally not the rent money cash to play around with.
The S&P 500 returns about 7% annually over a time window of many years. That's equivalent to doubling every decade or so. That's the average expected return from the stock market over a long time window. Expecting much better results is a problem, but expecting average returns does not require any luck.
Of course, investing rent money in any market that is volatile over a time window when the money is needed is a problem, but that's not a problem only for the stock market.
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Time
Skill
Luck
Money
Luck, being the easiest of those will always be attractive to those without the others.
For what, though? (Score:3)
Apple already had a perpetual architecture license that let them do whatever they wanted with ARM chips for as long as they wanted to. Their ARM chips are also already considered to be the best on the market. So what exactly are they licensing here?
Re:For what, though? (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably any new shit that ARM may come up with that isn't covered by the perpetual license of ARM chip designs and the ARM instruction set. It's entirely possible that Apple can get a peek inside their R&D labs, having such a positive and beneficial long-term relationship going back 30 years.
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Apple already had a perpetual architecture license that let them do whatever they wanted with ARM chips for as long as they wanted to. Their ARM chips are also already considered to be the best on the market. So what exactly are they licensing here?
I think Apple might have a perpetual license to the 32-bit ARM instruction set because they helped design it. Maybe that even covers the 64-bit ISA because of their similarity. But if memory serves, at least some of Apple's cores started out as ARM designs and were then massively reengineered and optimized. If they want to continue doing that, they presumably have to license those designs.
Re:For what, though? (Score:4, Informative)
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when you have a cash stockpile of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars (depending on who you want to believe)
They self-reported to the SEC that they have over $62B cash on hand [companiesmarketcap.com] at the end of June.
I tend to believe the legal filings that if proven false land C-suite people in jail for falsifying business records and perjury, which then leads to being sued for billions of dollars by shareholders and the board of directors throwing the management under the bus so hard that they'll bounce.
Post-Enron, all these guys know the risks of fucking around with the SEC on the regulatory filings, and so do their auditors post-A
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New chip developments of course.
Or do you really believe they have a license for something that does not even exist yet?
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That's never been confirmed. Only a few insiders know what that deal is. Maybe it doesn't cover new versions. Maybe Apple still has to pay a per unit fee, and wanted that reduced. Who knows?
This page seems to have some info, but on principal I am not getting a paid subscription to find out https://thechipletter.substack... [substack.com]
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So what exactly are they licensing here?
They will be licensing any new architectures that ARM might release. For example, ARMv9.0 and up. The M2 is based on ARMv8.6-A so there is definitely a need for Apple to acquire rights to use newer architectures.
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IPO Trial Balloon (Score:2)
A lot of people are going to watch how this one goes down - I expect that if this IPO goes they way they hope it does, that we'll start to see a lot more IPOs being floated in the next few weeks.
If it bombs, expect a few more rounds of budget (read: staff) cuts as the VC boys convince each and every one of their startups that "now is not the time to IPO" and they should "preserve cash until the market improves"; which when translated from VC bro bullshit to everyone-speak really means "I might only make a c
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If TSMC's one sole 3nm fab plant happened to have a bout of "rapid unscheduled disassembly", perhaps due to a rocket from their neighbors next door, Apple's goose will be cooked for many years.
Three years at most. TSMC expects to open a 5nm fab in Arizona next year, and to begin 3nm production there in 2026 [fierceelectronics.com].
And if something that catastrophic happened, you can bet they would pour a huge amount of money into making that happen sooner.
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"And if something that catastrophic happened, you can bet they would pour a huge amount of money into making that happen sooner."
Unless that catastrophic thing is no )&*(&% water. Arizona isn't on the upswing in water resources.
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If China gets into a shooting war with Taiwan and TSMC's fabs are destroyed, where Apple is going to get their next CPU fabbed for their next overpriced phone is likely to be pretty far down the list of concerns for basically everybody.
I mean, I know it will be a super huge bummer that you won't get a new phone that is a whole single-digit percent improved over your current one for $1500 while 23 million people are killed, injured, or just merely oppressed by a hostile invading authoritarian regime; but tha
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To be fair, we had the same problem with the iPAQ running WinCE.
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Let me get this straight... you expected the following combination to work acceptably?
- an Apple Newton designed in 1993, or in the best case, one of the MessagePad 2000 / 2100 models released in 1998;
- a 1st or 2nd generation 802.11b radio that was designed for a laptop with a far bigger battery in 1999 (and in the best case, the 5V PCMCIA radios used ~1.2W while idle and 1.5W transmitting);
- 4x AA batteries, or a total of 16Wh total to run the entire device, which was built 30 years ago before we had lite
Token fee (Score:2)
Just enough to convince ARM not to go adventuring in court like with the Qualcomm/NUVIA mess.
ARM long ago signed away the family jewels to Apple, now they own little of value any more. Licensing to also-rans is not where the big money is ... and trying to squeeze blood from that stone just hastens their irrelevance.