INVESTIGATES
Apple’s best buys
Apple Inc is huge. But it’s taken on smaller companies to achieve its goal. What’s next?
WRITTEN BY DAVID CROOKES
Image credit: Apple Inc
mage credit: Apple Inc
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What do Siri, Face ID and
Maps have in common?
Other than being part and
parcel of Apple’s products, these core components of the Apple ecosystem have directly benefited from acquisitions. The same is true of Apple silicon, Apple Music and even macOS. Now Pixelmator is set to join the fold, showing yet again that when Apple doesn’t have the expertise in-house, it will swoop on those who do possess the skills.
Apple has made hundreds of acquisitions over the years. You only need to look at Wikipedia to see a list of 130 companies, yet that only scratches the surface. Although there have been some big-name purchases such as Beats Music and Beats Electronics (acquired for a cool $3 billion), Apple has snapped up many smaller, far less well-known companies, most of which have not been identified. And without those acquisitions, Apple would be a very different beast today.
When Apple seeks to acquire a company, it focuses more on the engineers behind the products they’re working on. It looks at how bringing them on board will assist with Apple’s overall vision and what benefit there will be to the
Apple user base. As CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in 2019, Apple is “primarily looking for talent and intellectual property”. And it prefers smaller companies over larger ones because they have a far greater focus – along with a sufficiently small profile that allows most of them to slip under the radar thereby giving Apple a competitive edge.