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It's funny how there seems to be so little correlation between acquisition prices and eventual value. The PA Semi acquisition was an enormous success at what was at the time a tiny price. NeXT was an enormous success, though $400M at the time was a bet-the-farm price for Apple.

In contrast, while I'm sure Beats has easily paid for itself, $3B was not exactly cheap, and the results were not 10x PA Semi.

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I remember people being flabbergasted by the price they paid for PA Semi. Dividing the price by the number of engineers seemed indeed ludicrous. And yet, here we are.

At the time, there were only 3 comments on HN I could find. One of them was certainly questioning the decision: [1]

But wmf was right on the money [2]: "Maybe Apple thinks they can outdo the Cortex".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171511

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171879

I'm amused to see 'wmf commenting today about M1 ;)

Who is wmf?

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wmf

Good find. I was a lot more focused on PPC back then. After Apple switched to Intel, I didn’t really see the reason for PA Semi’s acquisition.

The iPhone’s magic was all about the software to me.

I think it's impossible to accurately determine the ROI of an acquisition with incomplete data. There's way too many factors at play.

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