Apple's confirmation that it has bought the Israeli company which provided the technology for the first Kinect sensors - at $350m - gives many clues to its importance.
That Apple is paying US$350 million for PrimeSense, the Israeli technology company, suggests that the Israeli company's systems will be a key technology for the company. It really wants it for something - and fast.
The amount paid is comparable with the $356m that Apple laid out in July 2012 to buy the fingerprint recognition company Authentec - whose scanning technology was incorporated into the iPhone 5S, released in September 2013 - and the $390m paid in December 2011 for Anobit, another Israeli company, which specialises in flash memory technologies.
The Authentec technology must have been built into the phone rapidly, because the typical lead time for a phone design is at least a year, and the incorporation of fingerprint scanning would have required extensive testing. Apple was almost certainly working with Authentec ahead of the acquisition, but seems to have seen its technology as so important it had to own everything about it.
Similarly, Anobit's specialism, of making flash memory (used in almost every Apple product, including its computers) function better, seems to have triggered a decision by the Cupertino company to snap it up. The results aren't as visible as a fingerprint scanner, but it seems a certainty that the expertise that Anobit had is being applied across the product range.
Source: the Wall Street JOurnal
Source: the Wall Street JOurnal
