Intel

An analyst at Jefferies & Company has offered his take on the prospect of an Apple future that merges operating environments and taps more into Apple's in-house chip technology.

"We believe Apple is looking to merge iOS (iPhones/iPads) with OS X (Macs) into a single platform for apps and cloud services starting in 2012-13," Jefferies & Company analyst Peter Misek wrote in an August 2 research note entitled "One to Rule Them All: iOS and OS X Roadmaps to Merge."

Highlights of Misek's research note:

Texas Instruments and Google are hooking up on Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Android that will run on both phones and tablets.

Though TI has been a player in Android phones (most notably the Motorola Droid series), it has been largely absent from Android tablets, which are populated with Nvidia's Tegra chips mostly. That is expected to change with Ice Cream Sandwich, however, which will finally fuse the phone and tablet versions of Android into one.

Ice Cream Sandwich will allow developers to create apps once. The operating system, due in the fourth quarter, will be smart … Read more

Ultrabook devices will be rolled out in roughly three phases, with both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt technologies as key features, according to an Intel blog item posted Thursday. Intel and PC makers are staking a big part of their laptop and hybrid device future on Ultrabooks.

The blog item, which begins by referring to a "strategic inflection point"--a phrase used often by founder and former CEO Andy Grove--drops other catchphrases, such as "sea change." Is this the usual product hype? Probably not.

Ultrabooks may in fact radically alter laptop computing. Look no further than … Read more

Intel said today that former chief financial officer Andy Bryant will become its new chairman in May 2012.

In preparation for this move, Intel's board of directors elected Bryant as vice chairman of the board, a new position. He will serve alongside the current chairman, Jane Shaw, until she retires from the board next May, Intel said in a statement Tuesday.

Bryant joined Intel in 1981 and later served as chief financial officer for 13 years and more recently as executive vice president responsible for the Technology and Manufacturing Group and then as chief administrative officer. Prior to joining … Read more

Solid-state drive prices continue to fall, and SanDisk is doing its part with a new 240GB laptop drive for $450. But don't expect to pay that kind of price when getting an SSD directly from Apple or Hewlett-Packard.

Flash memory-based SSDs are the storage of choice in cutting-edge, weight-sensitive designs. They're standard in all the new 2011 MacBook Airs and will populate the new wave of Ultrabooks due later this year. Drives of 256GB capacity from first-tier suppliers such as Micron Technology were more than $500 earlier this year, so a new drive from SanDisk with comparable capacity … Read more

As of Saturday, the price of a new 2010 11.6-inch MacBook Air had fallen well below $900 at Best Buy, in the wake of the release of the 2011 models. And refurbs are now under $750 from Apple.

While other retailers list the low-end 11.6-inch model (MC516LL/A) at just below $900, Best Buy is listing it at $834.99. The 2010 11.6-inch Air is equipped with a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics, 2GB of memory, and a 64GB flash drive.

How long the Best Buy price will last is anyone'… Read more

Intel's Sandy Bridge processors aren't just for Apple MacBooks and elite Windows laptops anymore. The latest and greatest Intel chip technology is now landing in sub-$400 lappies from Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba.

To wit, behold HP's $349 Pavilion g4-1104dx. In addition to goodies like a 14-inch LED display, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB hard disk drive, a multiformat optical drive, a Webcam, and integrated Ethernet, you get a Pentium processor B940 with integrated Intel graphics silicon.

No, that's not the Pentium processor of yore. The new Pentium is a bona fide Sandy Bridge processor, which … Read more

Into a 0.68-inch high enclosure, Apple has dropped a modern high-performance engine where an old poky one used to be. That new powerplant would be Intel's newest power-efficient Core i5 processors, of course.

Where a Core 2 Duo--introduced way back in 2006--was, the new MBAs house spanking new Sandy Bridge chips. Intel's newest design is two generations removed from the Core 2 Duo. And that means you get nice design extras like processors that overclock automatically when applications demand bursts of speed. Intel calls this turbo frequency.

So what's under the hood specifically? The i5-2467M (11.… Read more

On the back of good but not great earnings Wednesday, Intel CEO Paul Otellini was queried about how Windows 8--the first mainstream operating system from Microsoft to support ARM chips--will change the competitive landscape.

During the company's earnings conference call today, questions from one analyst focused on how the chipmaker will fend off an expected crush of devices running Windows 8 on ARM processors. ARM chips power most of the world's smartphones and tablets.

Intel has consistently held an overwhelmingly dominant position in PCs, aka "client" devices, but the definition of a PC is changing quickly … Read more