Sorry, but Apple STILL won’t buy Palm
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Feb 8, 2006 at 3:46am
Speculation that Apple plans to buy handheld maker Palm has been revived by a call from two leading Palm investors for the company to be put up for sale, according to the local paper of both companies. Sorry, folks, but it ain’t gonna happen.
Mike Nelson, who owns eight per cent of Palmshares, argued that the company is poorly equipped to dominate the market for smartphones which are beginning to eat into sales of traditional PDAs, reports Siliconvalley.com. The drift from PDAs to smartphones is underlined by a report by the analysts from IDG, notes Personal Computer World.
Palm has sold one million phone-enabled Treos and its stock has nearly doubled in value over the past year. But Nelson is reported to have told the Palm board that competitors are developing products quickly and could afford to sacrifice profits to gain market penetration. Another shareholder, with five per cent of Palm shares, also urged a sale of the company late last year.
“The fact that Apple has been named as a possible buyer may seem strange to those who recall that one of the most controversial acts of CEO Steve Jobs was to kill off the pen-driven Apple Newton, a pre-cursor of the Palm Pilot, when he returned to the company after a 10-year absence in 1996,” says Personal Computer World. “Yet the two companies are closely linked. They are near neighbours and several early Palm employees, including co-founder and former company president Donna Dubinsky, previously worked with Apple.”
Sure, Jobs tried to buy Palm in the late nineties. But those days have passed. So has Jobs’ interest in buying Palm, I’d think. Apple won’t enter the traditional handheld arena. And if (when?) it enters the smartphone market, it will do so with in-house products most likely spun off from its iPod base.
“Also, for all their vaunted style, the latest Apple notebooks look like antiques beside the latest pen-driven Tablet PCs,” Personal Computer World adds. “The company will sooner or later be forced to offer a pen interface, and could benefit from Palm expertise in the area – especially as tablets are getting smaller, and may eventually supersede the PDA.”
I’m not sure that Apple will be “forced” to offer a pen interface. So far tablet computers haven’t exactly set the world on fire. But if and when Apple enters this market, it will do so with its own (this time Mac-based) product.
Apple won’t buy Palm. There’s simple no reason for them to.
Thoughts? Write me at dsellers@macsimumnews.com
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
