“Samsung Electronics and Apple have been technology’s oddest bedfellows: bitter foes in finished products but indispensible as friends in parts like chips and screens,” Kim Yoo-chul reports for Reuters. “But with Apple moving quickly to reduce its reliance on Samsung’s semiconductor capability amid an intensifying intellectual property dispute between the companies in smartphones and tablets, the relationship is now about to become one-dimensional.”
“According to industry sources, Apple has not collaborated with Samsung in the process to develop its A6 microprocessor used in its latest iPhone 5. Samsung has handled the manufacturing of the processors used in previous iPhones and believed to have contributed in their design to some degree,” Kim reports. “Apple is still relying on the Korean firm to manufacture its chips but has made it clear it will no longer use its rival’s technology, according to a senior Samsung official. ‘Samsung’s agreement with Apple is limited to manufacturing the A6 processors. Apple did all the design and we are just producing the chips on a foundry basis,’ he said on the sidelines of a technology fair at KINTEX in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province.”
Kim reports, “Park Hyun, a senior analyst at Tongyang Securities, believes Samsung’s souring relationship with Apple could have a significant business effect. ‘It appears that Samsung is losing its multibillion dollar partnership as Apple has been its biggest parts client,’ Park said… A report from Barclays claimed TSMC will start producing Apple’s A7 processors from the first quarter of 2014 and stressed hundreds of TSMC researchers and chip developers are currently set to produce processors that are free from Samsung patents… As the patent war deepens, the two companies have seen a faster deterioration of their business partnership. Apple has already reduced its memory chip orders from Samsung for the iPhone 5 as it intends to widen its supply chain.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What was that we wrote last spring? Oh, yeah:
Here’s hoping Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to kick some Samsung ass someday, for a change, and is working very hard to alleviate, not maintain, or Jobs forbid, increase, Apple’s dependence on Samsung going forward. If not, perhaps Tim Cook, not to mention Apple shareholders, should “wake up.”
Here’s a question for Apple Inc. shareholders to ask their employee, Mr. Cook (tcook@apple.com): On which planet do companies get paid billions to stamp out parts for competitors’ products and then, once they’re assembled, turn around and repeatedly piss all over them while churning out an unending stream of knockoffs of the very products that they publicly denigrate?
(Obviously, and unfortunately, Mr. Cook thinks that planet is named “Earth.”)
Here’s a shorter question for Apple Inc. shareholders to ask their employee, Mr. Cook: WTF are you doing any business at all with Samsung?
Did Mr. Cook, operations genius, really get Apple so dependent on one company that Apple cannot live without them?
Samsung has been ripping off Apple for nearly half a decade now. How long, exactly, does it take to stop doing business with them? – MacDailyNews Take, April 26, 2012
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You want to know what’s really unbelievable? That, after half a decade, at least, of Samsung’s slavish copying, Apple continues to do billions of dollars of business with Samsung. Apple, which has enough money to build or bankroll anything they want, like a chip fab, or a touch screen display factory, or anything they could ever need.
“Oh, you copied our iPhone, our iPod touch, our iOS home screen, our icons, and our Mac mini? Here’s another three endless German lawsuits and, oh yeah, by the way, a $10 billion contract for touch screens.”
Something just does not compute here. If you get mugged, do you buy the leather for a new wallet from your mugger while pressing charges? If you’re Tim Cook, you do.
Apple could have – and should have – dropped Samsung like a bad habit years ago. Not one red cent should be going from Apple to Samsung today. It’s a travesty. It’s poor planning. And it’s bad business. The only conclusion we can draw is that Tim Cook, operations genius, boxed Apple in and is now stuck; beholden to a den of thieves. That sort of “decision making” doesn’t bode well for Apple’s future. It really doesn’t.
Here’s the question Walt Mossberg should have asked Cook onstage at D10: “Excuse me, Tim, but WTF are you still doing any business at all with Samsung?”
Wouldn’t you love to hear the answer to that one? Walt could use Keynote to flash all of Samsung’s knockoffs of Apple’s designs on the big screen behind Tim while he sputtered and stammered.
Next shareholders’ meeting or conference call, somebody might want to ask Mr. Cook that one. – MacDailyNews Take, June 1, 2012
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October 15, 2012: Go, Tim, go!!!