Should Apple buy Palm?

20 years ago

“Speculation that Apple plans to buy handheld maker Palm has been revived by a call from two leading Palm investors for the company to be put up for sale, according to the local paper of both companies,” Clive Akass reports for Personal Computer World. “The fact that Apple has been named as a possible buyer may seem strange to those who recall that one of the most controversial acts of CEO Steve Jobs was to kill off the pen-driven Apple Newton, a pre-cursor of the Palm Pilot, when he returned to the company after a 10-year absence in 1996. Yet the two companies are closely linked. They are near neighbours and several early Palm employees, including co-founder and former company president Donna Dubinsky, previously worked with Apple.”

“Jobs tried to buy the company in the late nineties, according to the Mercury. Neither Apple nor Palm has given any sign that there is any basis for the renewed speculation but there are obvious fits between the two companies,” Akass writes. “Apple’s Ipod [sic] boom can hardly be sustained unless it can head off competition from PDAs and smartphones that can pack music players along with a host a other functions. Palm itself was slow off the mark in adding tricky telephony technology to its products and Apple would have a hard time starting from scratch in the market. Also, for all their vaunted style, the latest Apple notebooks look like antiques beside the latest pen-driven Tablet PCs. The company will have sooner or later be forced to offer a pen interface, and could benefit from Palm expertise in the area – especially as tablets are getting smaller, and may eventually supersede the PDA.”

Full article here.
Mr. Akass, meet Inkwell. To write that Apple’s portables look like antiques compared to Tablet PCs is ridiculous. Apple’s laptops should be compared to other laptops (most of which look like a bathroom scale when close, BTW), not to tablets. Apple’s portables are sleek, modern designs. Stop reading and recycling The Boston Herald’s Brett Arends’ scribblings, Mr. Akass. Apple doesn’t need Palm – Newton’s handwriting recognition is still better than the technology that Palm ships today. And Tablet PC sales aren’t exactly setting the world on fire, either.

“In 2001, Jobs explained: ‘You can’t imagine how many people think we’re crazy for not doing a Palm,’ said Jobs, ‘I won’t lie; we thought about it a lot. But I started asking myself, how useful are they, really? How many people at a given meeting show up with one? I don’t think early cultures had organisers, but I do know they had music.’ – Sydney Morning Herald, May 24, 2005

[Of course, we wouldn’t mind if an Apple-designed, Apple-branded mobile phone+PDA+iPod device became available, but Apple certainly doesn’t need Palm if they wanted to create such a product.]