Post #3477007
2026-06-24 13:03 UTC
And, not for nothing, but Apple's stake in ARM was a large part of why, despite all the bad press, Apple was never going to go under. They were sitting on not just an immense pile of cash, somewhere more than $6B USD at the time, and very good sales of Macintoshes ($1B/quarter at the time), they were sitting on a gold mine of ARM shares. ARM was a joint venture of Acorn, Apple, and VLSI Technologies, growing out of Acorn UK's RISC CPUs. And then they made the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad.
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@gcvsa@mstdn.plus 2026-06-24 13:05
And the rest, as they say, is now history. Apple went from being "beleaguered" to being the highest capitalized company in the world. Back in the late 1990s, very few people would have predicted that ARM chips would come to be one of the major platforms in the industry. After all, the most visible product even using their chips back then was the Apple Newton MessagePad. I did, because I understood the technology.