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Apple Outsources A5 Chip Manufacture ... To Texas
Lindan9 writes "In a 9 billion dollar investment, Apple's A5 chips will now be produced in Austin, TX, in a new Samsung factory that is apparently 'the largest-ever foreign investment in Texas.'" According to the article, the factory's been churning out chips since the beginning of this month.
yay, jerbs?
It's not Apple that made the $9b investment - Samsung did. The headline to the news entry suggests that it was otherwise. Grammer is so hard i kno lol!
Heh... Says you...
TI
Freescale
AMD
IBM
Qualcomm
These and more have more than a piddling engineering presence in Austin.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Dell and HP are also Texas corporations, which are two giants in producing end products for the entire globe. Of course, Dell finishes their stuff in Mexico (which is still better than China).
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Regarding the expansion to support Apple chips, "Samsung has been an Austin-area employer since 1996...The company will also hire an additional 500 employees."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
When you can site 2001: A Space Oddessy as prior art, that gives Samsung license to tell Apple to go eat a bowl of dicks. Apple? innovators? My ass. They sell marked-up shiny.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-08/24/samsung-2001-prior-art
According to Samsung, director Stanley Kubrick had the idea for tablet computers about four decades ago, in the 1968 sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. A clip from the film (available on YouTube, Samsung hastens to add), shows astronauts eating while watching a TV show on flat, personal computers.
The Galaxy Tab maker argues that Kubrick's forward-thinking tablet has, "an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table's surface), and a thin form factor."
1,100 high-tech employees on the processor side of the fab, and more than that on the flash memory side. A $3.6 billion construction project. Yes, I'd say they will appreciate it.
not just that if you actually look it's more
that's a fair wad of cash injected into the local economy and not an investment to be sniffed at at all.
Reuters has an article on it HERE
In the U.S., design patents can only be granted for "ornamental" features. i.e. features which serve no functional purpose. The Coca-Cola bottle is the archetypical example. Making that bottle that shape serves no function, it's completely ornamental.
In that regard, flat, rectangular, and rounded corners are all functional, which is why Apple was denied the injunction they sought against Samsung in the U.S. The color of the bezel could be regarded as ornamental, but with black, white, and silver being the most common choices, I seriously doubt any design patent based on a black bezel would stand. If Apple striped it a certain way, that might qualify. The only other design patent-worthy aspect of the Apple's complaint I can think of is the radius of the rounded corners. But that can easily be circumvented by using rounded corners with a slightly different radius.
And by the way, the appearance of the iPad from the front is a near-clone of a Samsung digital picture frame released in 2006. Be careful who you accuse of copying whom.
The article states that there are ~1100 jobs created out of this. I work in the semiconductor manufacturing industry (major competitor to Samsung) and can tell you that of those 1100 jobs my estimate is that >600 of those are college graduates (engineers of some kind mostly) and I would estimate that there are probably ~100 PhDs. With a state of the art facility that cost $9bn you can bet that there are lots of technical hurdles that are constantly springing up especially as new products are being manufactured in the factory. The part of the manufacturing that requires lots of low cost, low skilled labor is the assembly portion which is still occurring in Asia but wafer manufacturing, especially on a cutting edge process, requires lots of very technically skilled labor. This is why Samsung built their wafer factory in Austin where there is a large supply of technical college graduates.
In case of Samsung in particular, its stock only trades on the Korean stock market.
Not exactly - it also trades on the London and Luxembourg stock exchanges, but what's sold there might be their Global Depository Receipts. Apparently, "as someone residing outside Korea, [I] may invest in Samsung stock (005930, 005935) through a qualified institutional broker in Seoul", and "For information regarding investment in Samsung GDR, [I should] contact [my] broker."
Apparently a slight majority of their stock, and a significant majority of their preferred stock, is foreign-held, although I don't know whether there's anything those pie charts are leaving out. The "List of a Major Shareholder & Related Parties" includes several individuals with Korean names and affiliates with names that include the string "Samsung" (today's lesson is brought to you by the letters "c" "h" "a" "e" "b" "o", and "l"), and the "List of Shareholders with the Ownership of 5% and above" includes Good Old American First National City Bank, err, umm, Citibank, along with Samsung Life Insurance and National Pension Service (probably meaning the Korean national pension service)