The ongoing squabble between Apple and Samsung has taken another vicious turn, with tech blog DigiTimes reporting that Apple is shifting reliance for its flash memory chips used in its iPads and iPhones away from Samsung, which is currently its biggest supplier.
Apple will reportedly instead have its memory needs increasingly tended to by Toshiba and Japan-based Elpida Memory, according to DigiTimes’ unnamed sources, with the former supplying Apple with NAND flash chips and the latter with mobile RAM. Samsung is currently the world’s biggest supplier of both, and has been selling its chips to Apple since the original iPhone launched in 2007.
This latest spat comes after nearly two months of back and forth between Apple and Samsung, which kicked off when Apple scored an injunction in a court in Germany banning the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1. The embargo has since been lifted, but Samsung have hit back with their own team of legal eagles, saying in the Korean press that Samsung will attempt to have Apple’s much-rumoured iPhone 5 banned before it’s even launched, for infringement of Samsung wireless patents.
Are Apple and Samsung permanently dividing up their CD collections and moving on? We’ll probably have to wait until the iPad 3 to find out, but for now, it looks like a good day to be in business for Toshiba and Elpida.
Source: DigiTimes
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