Steve Jobs hinted recently that Apple could make a very strategic acquisition:
"We strongly believe that one or more very strategic opportunities may come along, that we can take, that we're in a unique position to take advantage of because of our strong cash position"
“We would like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future.”
And the rumor is that this strategic opportunity could be Sony. As a result of that, Sony stock went up but it seems that today the dust is settling down and everything is getting back to normal.
Read more on this story at Macrumors and Crunchgear.
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39 Comments
LOL. This will never ever happen.
Apple = irrevelant outdated hypy cluxclux white clanish expensive proucts.
Sony = Leader in Sound & imagery !!!
A few years ago, the apple was rotten & close to bankrupsy. When people will realise that it is just about Tha buzz, they’ll go down again, for ever hopefully…
YEAH RIGHT!!!! SONY aka Matsuchita, is a so huge company Aple can’t afford It Microsoft could but It will never be authorized by Nipon government, this is the funiest rumor of the week!!
…did you buy an I pad LOL maybe an I poud tough with stuck 8 G LOL!!_
Not sure what was funnier, the rumor itself or Amien’s idiotic comment. Yeah Amien hopefully you held Sony and not Apple’s stock for the last few years ha ha.
A few years ago? Try 13 years ago. Steve Jobs returned to Apple on July 9, 1997 and within a year, started to turn the company around. By 1998, Apple got rid of all those confusing product lines (Performa, Centris, Mac LC, Quadra, etc.). In January, 1999 they released the first iMac, which was a huge success. And then the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, not to mention stunning laptops, all of which completely redefined or invented product categories. Nikon or Canon should be run as well as Apple.
Apple has the second highest market cap of any U.S. company (behind Exxon-Mobil) with the stock within a few points of it’s all time high (hitting 318 on 10/18, closed at 308 today…most analysts are predicting 400 within a year). They have beat records almost every quarter for years. They have tons of cash and no debt. They have been running on all cylinders in spite of the world wide recession. Yes, they’re a bit arrogant and they don’t like listening to their customers, but they may be the best run company in the U.S.
Sony was a great company when Akio Morita was still alive. In some respects, Morita was a lot like Steve Jobs in that he didn’t believe in focus groups and he wanted Sony to produce products that he wanted to personally use. That’s how the Walkman got invented (or at least that’s the legend of how the Walkman got invented.) But Sony hasn’t been the same since Morita left. They bought CBS Records just before the entire record industry started to decline. They produced proprietary products that might have been better (Betamax, although that was done when Morita was still there), but that they refused to license, so it failed. They produced redundant formats that no none wanted to use (MiniDisc). They produce many products that are garbage that IMO, hurt their reputation overall. They let Sanyo manufacture their TV screens, then charged more for essentially the same product. Etc. Personally, I think Howard Stringer is the wrong guy to be running Sony. And maybe after years of not being all that successful in turning Sony around, he’s looking for a way out.
I don’t happen to believe that Apple would buy Sony. And I think it would be too distracting if they did because Apple actually does not have a huge management team. But I could see Apple buying Sony in order to get the record catalog, the music publishing, the TV/move studio and the Sony PlayStation business. Then they would split up and sell off the rest of the pieces and probably get their entire investment back.
There’s another rumor that Apple would buy Disney/ABC. That would cost them more: the market cap of Disney/ABC is $69 billion and they’d have to pay a premium or the shareholders would balk, so it would cost at least $75 billion. Steve would get Pixar back, they could use ABC’s TV content for Apple TV and who knows what Steve would do if he got his hands on Disney World. But then they could sell the TV network in a deal that would still give them rights to the content, bringing the price down. And in that model, Apple could still pay cash for the transaction.
But frankly, I’d prefer to see Apple buy something more manageable, like Adobe or Avid, although the loss of competition might hurt Apple’s products in the long run.
What a surprise to find a post where someone actually “knows” what he/she is talking about.
ZoetMB – enjoyed reading your great post – thanks for posting it.
Ipods with a decent sonylike sound quality! I’d buy one!
Yeah, at least that’s what I read in my daily stock market spam…
2 proprietary companies that rate style and restrictions
over functionality and customer interests.
merger of equals i call that one
Bunch of bollocks. Will never happen. Neither Sony nor Apple will benefit from such a buyout. The gap between cultural and organizational differences is just too wide to bridge. Let alone that the Japanese government would most definitely interfere and try to prevent their most valued corporation to be devoured by a western corporation.
I guess that you were unaware that an American runs Sony.
… not own!!
Actually, he holds dual US-UK citizenship and he was born Welsh. He was knighted (he’s Sir Howard Stringer) so I think of him as being far more British than American.
But that has nothing to do with it anyway. In spite of the fact that Stringer is CEO of Sony, the company does have a Japanese culture in many respects and as others have posted, I doubt the Japanese government would permit a non-Japanese company to buy Sony.
IMHO there would be no point in Apple buying Sony. Sony buying Apple would be more probable, but still unlikely. Yen is up and Dollar is down making things Japanese at least 20 percent more expensive at this time – just look at the D90 replacement – approx 20% higher priced. Now the Chinese Yuan is comparatively low priced and China is a huge market aswell as Apple’s production center. Joint ownership of a Chinese company would make much more sense – say in Chinese Telecom.
In the US, Apple buying a small company like RED would make a lot of sense – unique product line – able to sell at a premium price. With the convergence of still photography, video and 3D, such a move is something that someone Mr Jobs could ponder doing.
Wonder what bank Apple is storing it’s cash in. With so many US Banks going belly up and the FDIC only covering up to $100K per account.
The D90 replacement is priced 20% higher because they gave it much more pro features this time – moving it up a class. I’m talking things they had at the time in the D300 (metal frame, focus micro-adjust, chip to meter on old lenses, etc.) but didn’t put in the D90, so not just inevitable technological improvements like higher megapixel count and better movie features. It is NOT simply due to yen to dollar strength.
So it’s a coincidence that the D90 replacement is priced approx 20% higher at the same time that the Yen has risen about 20%?
What “pro” features does the D7K have? If it had “pro” features it would affect the sales of Nikon’s Pro D3S. Not gonna happen.
Focus micro-adjust is common and I suspect is required to handle the variance in the internal lens servo motors. Prior to AF-S no one talked about focus issues. I suspect that this is just a firmwzare software adjustment to handle when the servo motor stops.
Metering with older lenses is something that many cameras can do. All Pentax DSLRs can meter and even mount going back to M42 screw mount lenses (need an m42 to K adapter). That is across the line from the K-X (K-R) and up. Canon DSLRs have always been able to meter old Nikkors. No not a typo. Buy a low cost Nikon to EOS adapter on ebay to enable mounting Nikkors and the Canon meters just fine. That also works with older Olympus OM, Contax/ Yashica and Leica among many many other brands. Metering with old lenses is something that Nikon crippled in the past.
One thing that “all” Nikon DSLR cannot do is meter with Nikon non-Ai lenses. Canon DSLR have no problem mounting via the cheap adpater and metering with non-Ai Nikkors.
Metal body is a marketing thing. I recall an Antartic trip taken by Luminous Lanscapes where a large number of Canon metal bodied PRO priced DSLRs died, but no plastic bodied DSLR died. A well designed plastic body is no less reliable than a full metal jacket body. At least the rubber grips do not peel off the plastic bodies. I also don’t think that a stamped metal body costs that much more than a precision injected plastic body. You don’t hear D90 users complaing that their plastic bodied cameras were falling apart. I don’t know but doubt that the thickness and precision of the D7K body is the same as found in the D3S body.
The D7K is not marketed by Nikon as a Pro camera. It is a consumer camera sold at Best Buy, just like the D90 which it replaces.
Apple is going to buy adobe, they want to come back into the pro image editing and pro edition market which for Mac computers were initially targetted
Buying Adobe would make sense – for Apple, not for the rest of the world. Let’s hope Microsoft get it.
Apple has absolutely NO desire to go back to the professional market.
Here’s why:
1) Back when they were mostly aiming at this market, they were near bankruptcy.
2) Making consumer products is what saved them (ipods, itunes, apps, cheap macbooks 13″, iphones, ipads, macbook air)
3) Look at their latest products: new iphone, ipad, new macbook air, new ipods
4) Their imacs are now aimed at consumer because they obviously don’t offer the specs needed for serious work.
Only the mac pro remains, at a crazy price, for those crazy rich people already in the pro business, they see it as a tool.. compared to other work field where you’ll need like 75 000$ for a truck.. a little 15 000$ on a kick ass workstation is nothing.. so they don’t care… Those people don’t need apple to be trendy or anything, they just need the tool, apple doesn’t really care about them, they just maintain a solution.
I doubt that Adobe would be interested in merging with apple unless the offer would be ultra good because apple is already competing with adobe (final cut studio, aperture, etc) and I bet Apple will keep that kind of money for more consumer oriented products… because this is where the money is.
If microsoft buys adobe, I guess that means they want to bite that professional market a bit more… I think there’s a lot of future of windows in the professional field because those “problems” with windows are mostly due from bad reputation (a bit like how we talk more and more about violence but there’s no really more violence than yesterday out there, I won’t go on on this because I’m badly informed but you get the point, talking about it makes it true) and because those using the machines don’t know what they are doing and are blaming the machine instead… With future generations we will get less of this because we’re gonna end up with people who grew up with computers.. I started using computers when I was 13 and I’m 23.. I have a pretty extensive experience and I totally know what I’m doing.. imagine in 30 years.. we’re gonna have people who grew up with computers from age 3.. and they are gonna be 33 years old.. that’s a whole different story and today’s 40th, 50th professionals..
Anyway…
Apple shouldn’t buy Adobe.. it’s not worth it for them.
Apple will probably not buy Sony.. Sony is WAAAAAAAY too big.. the opposite would make more sense.. except that Apple won’t get sold to anyone.. at least until Steve Jobs dies…
No offence, if you call a Mac Pro expensive compared to another Windows based workstation, you’re smoking crack, you’re really poor or you don’t know much about computers like you attest to.
Don’t be retarded and buy peripherals and extras from Apple, buy them third party and you can have an awesome machine for a few thousand bucks. I remember when I bought my Mac, the HP and Dell equivalent cost twice as much. £15,000 for a Mac Pro… What are you doing, click add to basket on everything? Lol. No one purchases a £15,000 Mac Pro.
Despite what you think, Apple relies on the pro market. I kitted out my design firm with iMacs for basic work, and a number of Mac Pros for audio and graphic design, and it was a shit ton cheaper than other manufacturers. Not to mention some of the best software is Apple exclusive. iMac’s are perfectly capable, amateurs who think they are professionals claim they don’t have enough horsepower, but that’s the thing with amateurs, they don’t know what they’re doing so they blame equipment. This is why most amateur music and photography is terrible compared to professionals, even when professionals use whatever equipment is available to them, sometimes it’s just adequate. A bad workman blames his tools.
If you think Apple neglect the Pro market, you’re a fool.
1st) 15 000$ was kind of an exaggeration… but it’s quite easy to pump the price of the mac pro.
2nd) 15 000$ is not 15 000 pounds. I was refering to canadian money.. however there’s little difference with american money so I did not specify.
3rd) I know people who buy 10 000-13 000$ mac pro work stations, I sell mac pros.
4th) I’m aware that it’s cheaper to buy your parts from someone else than apple and lots of people do.. still lots of people don’t give a crap about money and just rather get everything from apple.
Buying and apple machine or a dell machine is pretty much the same stuff to me.. The key to pay the right price for a computer is to buy the pieces yourself… Yes mac pros are expensive unless you get 2 cpus, which makes their price a bit closer to reality.
I never said Apple neglects the pro market, they simply believe they don’t need to do any kind of marketing investments or fancy stuff for this market since they have the fidelity of most pros because they have softwares that are the industry standard.
Also, about how imacs can be used for serious work.. This is really a matter of what I mean by “serious” which is a bit “bigger” than what “serious” can be. So yeah.. the imac can be used for some print media and photos and stuff.. the 27″ offers some quite nice real estate too.. However, those machines are still limited for a lot of work.. they are barely customizable and are badly cooled… There are no reason to go imac if you need a professional machine because they obviously aren’t professional machine, there’s the mac pro for that.
Personally I’m still a student and while I got contracts in the video and photo field, I still can’t go blindly all in with a mac pro.. so I built myself a machine that is about 80% of a mac pro for about 40% of the price.. that’s cheaper than an imac that I couldn’t really do much on. This is a reality.
if your that pro i’d expect you to use eizo, instead of an apple cinema display.
and if you do enough imagery, you would know apple does not offer the best graphic cards there is to their line. the only ”professional” card that apple sells right now is the NVIDIA quadro 4800, which isn’t that new. everything else is just gaming cards. most ”pros” use mac, but the mac is really not much better for high quality rendering.
don’t get me wrong, i use a mac, and their great and good enough for tougher tasks. but i think people should just be honest about paying more money for something that looks cool and stop lying about how macs are the more professional tool in whatever field. otherwise you just make a real joke about yourself being a “pro” when you don’t seem to know enough about “pro” hardware and software.
“4) Their imacs are now aimed at consumer because they obviously don’t offer the specs needed for serious work.”
Sorry, but you’ve obviously never used one – an iMac has no problems at all doing serious work. A decently spec’ed Quad-Core iMac runs Lightroom/Aperture, Photoshop, etc extremely well.
Yep, only for the same price you can get 8-core CPU based PC. Cost to performance was and still is a Macs issue. I work on both – 4-core mac and 8-core PC which were at the same price. Works on any bigger video presentations I always take to PC. It’s noticeably faster.
The PC doesn’t run Mac OS X though, which defeats the purpose for me.
What saved Apple was getting rid of the President who was running Apple back then and bringing Steve Jobs back.
iMac specs are on par with Windows machines. The latest models have Intel I3, I5 and I7 processors with 4 to 8 gigs or more of ram. iMacs are running on the same Intel based hardware. The operating system is in my opinion more stable. and more secure. Loads of viruses on Windows and nada on Macs. The two areas where Macs fall behind is in stock trading software and network server software. Other areas like Audio production, Video production, Photo post processing, Desktop Publishing and CAD/CAM the Mac run the same or similar software. Heck one can even convert many regular PCs into a Hackintosh, so there is little difference in the hardware capabilities. The main difference is the operating system and the fact that only Apple manufactures Macs.
You can’t compare an imac with a tower pc, it’s not the same thing at all for several reasons.. cooling, overclocking possibilities, upgrades, choice of parts, number of parts.. I can get 8tb in my tower… how do you do that with your imac? btw, firewire is not the proper solution.
If you compare imacs with all-in-ones pc.. well I don’t even care about those machines, I bet the all-in-ones pc are even worse than imacs.
Also.. os x runs pretty well on home built machines if you know what you’re doing.. it’s just not legal… still if we compare what machines do.. you can take this into consideration.
I think win7 vs os x is pretty much a question of preference.. Personally, I really like both now. Also, I’d like to add that I feel that mac’s weakness is really file management.. while win7′s weakness would be multitasking unless you add tons of little add-ons that emulate osx’s exposé and osx’s spaces.. but now I feel like os x needs its own addon as well to emulate win7′s window moving/resizing keyboard shortcut.. seriously, beyond the initial look, those OS are getting more and more similar.. I like to think (hope) that this means we are approaching some universal standard on how those tools (softwares) should work.
Yeeeaahhh, riiiiight. I passed my cheese sandwich through my nose, I laughed so hard.
Sony is in no position to be bought, nor is Apple in any position to buy Sony.
Sony’s approximate equity: 2.8 Trillion
Apple approximate equity: 31.7 billion
LOL You forgot to convert the currency.
Sony = 2.8 Trillion “YEN”
Apple = 31.7 Billion “US Dollars”
They have pretty much the same, give or take a couple or so billion us dollars.
EPIC +1
HAHAHAHA
FAIL
An apple can not, and will not buy sony.
That’s the biggest load of rubbish I’ve heard…
lol yea title made me spill my coffee.
mac fanatics imagination that this minor company (which is only loud but not significant minority in anything outside portable mediaplayers ) can own whole world is lol beyond anything.
What is next? Steve jobs to buy Microsoft, IBM follows!
This is not a rumor, this is rubbish
Not sure if any of you guys have looked into buying Japanese companies, but alot of Japanese companies pension obligations are frightening. Haven’t looked in to Sony, but not sure Sony would make any sense for Apple. Apple has a brand name and they are beating Sony in alot of markets.
I built a “Super PC” 2 years ago for 1350$ & it still leads the best macs !!!
I had macs for 5 years but I hated their ” pay per fix & pay per everything ” conception. Some fools seem to like it though … Its a poor minded rich’s man concept !!!
It would appear that a lot of the computers being used for replies to this thread have either very dodgy keyboards or no spell checker installed.
Im worried about Admins (Peter)…no posts in any of his sites…nikon, PR and LR…i wonder if everythings is allright…
I just got back from Photo Plus Expo, did not have any time to post from the road.