What Apple bought
Apple's largest acquisition ever was not a chip company or an AI lab. It was Beats, the headphones, at $3bn.
Apple buys less than any company its size, and when it does buy, the price is usually small. Five deals over 22 years come to about $5.1bn - roughly what Google or Meta can spend on one.
What is odd is the order.
NeXT, 1997, $429m. Steve Jobs' company after he was pushed out of Apple. Its operating system became Mac OS X, and macOS and iOS still descend from it. It also brought Jobs back.
P.A. Semi, 2008, $278m. A chip design team. The A-series runs every iPhone; the M-series that grew out of it runs the Macs.
AuthenTec, 2012, about $356m. Fingerprint sensors. Touch ID shipped the next year, and Apple Pay stands on it.
Beats, 2014, $3bn. Headphones, plus the streaming service that became Apple Music. Still the biggest cheque Apple has written for a company.
Intel's smartphone modem business, 2019, $1bn. About 2,200 engineers and the patents.
The OS, the processor, the fingerprint sensor and the modem cost $2.06bn between them. The headphones cost $3bn.
Cheap is not the same as unimportant, and a price says nothing about what a deal was worth after. NeXT at $429m may be the best money any company has spent.
