New York Times on Apple-IBM Negotiations

John Markoff reporting for The New York Times:

Several executives close to the last-minute dealings between Apple and I.B.M. said that Mr. Jobs waited until the last moment — 3 p.m. on Friday, June 4 — to inform Big Blue. Those executives said that I.B.M. had learned about Apple’s negotiations with Intel from news reports and that Apple had not returned phone calls in recent weeks.

[…]

In the end, Mr. Jobs was given no choice but to move his business to Intel, when I.B.M. executives said that without additional Apple investment they were unwilling to pursue the faster and lower-power chips he badly needs for his laptop business.

In other words, it’s not that IBM couldn’t keep up, it’s that they wanted Apple to pay for the development costs for the new generations of chips.

★ Saturday, 11 June 2005