Just two days ago, Apple (News - Alert) announced that it would acquire Israel-based Anobit Technologies, a company that makes flash memory components that are crucial to the iPhone (News - Alert) and iPad's functions. This new acquisition will help Apple control its supply of flash components in its portable devices and might help it further optimize its products.

Until now, Anobit has been making high-tech controllers that allowed the iPhone and iPad to have substantial memory capacities without sacrificing space. Apple is currently the biggest purchaser in the world of NAND-type flash memory, having bought 23 percent of all the chips ever distributed in Q4 2011. So, what's with Apple's purchase of Anobit?

We already know that Apple wanted to get the pie factory and eat its own pie, but there's another logical reason why Apple acquired Anobit: the pie makers. Yes, almost all of Anobit's payroll was filled with engineers. Apple will now have 160 new chip engineers to add to its crew of over 1000. The increase in engineers will help Apple become a more innovative company and integrate more intelligent features in their products. Most importantly, Apple gets some really insane bragging rights.

Apple has depended on flash memory for several years, integrating them in place of hard drives in the iPod, the iPhone, and iPad. Recently, it also started integrating flash memory in the MacBook Air. Because of the lack of a hard drive, the MacBook Air laptop runs on much less power, retrieves data faster, and occupies a much smaller space. At least technology can become thin, sexy, fast, and less demanding.

The chip engineers will play an important role in the coming years, as Apple strays away from collaboration with Intel (News - Alert) and uses its own team to come up with the chips its future products will use. After all, Intel's more interested in massive processing power that often consumes a truckload of electricity. What Apple has done today will clearly have a positive effect on its future innovations.

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