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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

Is there evidence of Apple doing this in the past?

Apple is infamous for driving other companies into bankruptcy to acquire their assets. For a single example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_Technology

How is that an example of Apple driving a company into bankruptcy to acquire their assets? Judging from the Wikipedia article, it looks like Exponential Technologies made a good PowerPC CPU, but Motorola promised they'd be able to catch up, and it's safer to bet on a big company that you've been doing business with than to rely on a startup for a critical component.

Licensed Mac clones were only available for two years (1995-1997), and discontinuing the program drove many other companies out of business, so it's hard to see how the change was a ploy to acquire a single company's assets. It seems more likely that Jobs discontinued licensing because it caused Apple to lose money.

And it looks like much of the Exponential Technologies team continued under a different name, then was bought by Apple in 2010 for $121 million.[1]

If there are other examples, can you provide one that is more recent and/or more blatant?

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/technology/28apple.html

When they started, they were producing for multiple small customers. Apple was frustrated with Motorola and approached them but demanded they massively increase their production capacity (Apple's model for dominating a supplier... put them in debt and beholden to them for orders) and effectively dominated them as a customer...

Then used them to negotiate a better price with Motorola, dumped their purchase contract for 'reasons' and bankrupted the company.

Exponential sued.. and won $500 million... for breach contract but were destroyed by that point. Apple gobbled up their IP for around $20 mil later on.

I can't find any articles about Exponential winning the lawsuit, only that they filed one and sought $500 million in damages. Had they won, I think it would have been in the press. The only thing I could find was Apple's 10K from 1999[1], which says they settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount:

> This matter was settled during the fourth quarter of 1999 for an amount not material to the Company's financial position or results of operations.

If Apple did pay $500 million, I think that would have been material to the company's financial position, as their profit that year was $601M.

Again, are there any examples that are less debatable and/or more recent? I don't have a dog in this fight. But if Apple is infamous for this behavior, it seems like there would be stronger examples.

1. See page 59: https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...

I have not found the records online (a lawyer can probably find it) but I was involved with some of the people in 1997/1998. There were multiple lawsuits going for years as Apple held 5% ownership.

The original team ended up founding Intrinsity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity) and being involed with the Samsung A8 and Apple A4 designs. Apple ended up buying the company and many of those people are the ones designing their current chips. (https://touchreviews.net/apple-intrinsity-implications/)

Oh... and I forgot this case also exposed that Apple had embedded proprietary IP into the CPU design which made it impossible to seel the already produced CPUs to anyone else (PowerPC chips were in very high demand at the time and these were the fastest on the market).

That’s not evidence of Apple doing mass layoffs, though.

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