Apple Will Never Buy AMD But Let's Speculate For Fun

Source:  9to5Mac.

Here is an interesting article speculating on what Apple could do with AMD if it decides to buy it.  First of all, that’s not going to happen.  It’s likely Apple has enough chip designing talent right now.  Any future buyout would be specific to a need, not a wholesale buyout like AMD.  On top of that, Apple is looking to transition away from legacy chip designs like Intel as iOS devices dominate Apple’s attention.

However, it is fun to speculate.  A lot of reasons why Apple could benefit from buying AMD has been spoken for in the article.  I’ll let you read them yourself.  However, this is one particular point in the post that I find enticing for Apple fans.

That is that the government wants to make sure Intel has a competitor in the market.  While I doubt Apple would run amok of regulators if it does find reason to buy AMD, consider that Apple has never shared its technology willingly with others, it’s unlikely to share any future AMD chips with Dell, HP, or other PC competitors.  So, the market would have to turn to Intel for all their chip needs to run Windows.

Suddenly, Intel finds itself capable of charging whatever it wants because of a lack of market competition in the PC market.  Apple could suddenly create a condition in which its competition has to raise their prices because Intel chips sudden cost more.

Obviously, computing in the 80s, 90s, and even the early 2000s is vastly different from mobile computing today where ARM chips dominate.  Thus, Intel is likely to find competition from other chip designers and architectures.  And who is to say that if Apple does buy AMD, it won’t eventually sell off parts of the company it doesn’t need and the buyers still end up competing with Intel anyway.

Again, for speculation sake that Apple does buy AMD, it will target specific needs like graphics that it might benefit from.  And it won’t be just for more powerful and efficient graphics only but using the graphic powers to do tradition tasks that CPU is relied upon to perform.  We already have apps that go to the GPU to do some tasks.  Perhaps, Apple can take this even further with AMD’s GPU expertise.

This is just one example.

In truth, it’s unlike that we’ll see this happen.  Still, it is fun to speculate.