Apple’s acquisitions binge: 10 technologies that could show up at WWDC (free PDF)

Apple has upped its acquisitions game over the past year. And with WWDC is around the corner, there’s considerable speculation about what might appear as part of the event’s technology showcases. This ebook reviews 10 acquisitions that could play into new features for iOS and macOS.

From the ebook:

Even though Apple’s market value briefly popped above $1 trillion last year, it has been relatively conservative in terms of the number of companies it’s acquired over the years. According to Crunchbase, Apple has acquired 106 companies since its founding in 1976, or an average of 2.5 per year.

Microsoft, by contrast, has acquired an average of five businesses a year (a total of 219) since its founding in 1975. Google (now known as Alphabet, Inc.), was founded 20+ years later, in 1998. It has already acquired 233 companies, or a little more than 11 per year.

Of course, all three of these companies have grown over the years, and larger companies will make more acquisitions than smaller ones. So while Apple has averaged just over two acquisitions per year since its founding, it’s acquired 10 companies in just the last 12 months.

This becomes particularly relevant as we approach Apple’s WWDC early next month. WWDC is when Apple showcases new features for iOS and MacOS. History shows that some of those features have been derived directly from previous acquisitions, although not all debuted publicly at WWDC.

Perhaps the most famous is Siri. Siri was founded as a company in 2010 by SRI International-affiliated developers, who created an app for the iPhone. In October 2011, at Apple’s yearly iPhone event, Apple introduced Siri as part of iOS.

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