Apple confirms months of rumours as it announces the acquisition of the "majority" of the Intel smartphone modem business in a $1 billion deal covering intellectual property, equipment, leases and around 2200 employees.

The primary reason for such a purchase is, perhaps obviously, precious IP-- the Intel modem business includes no less than 17000 wireless technology patents covering anything from cellular standard protocols to modem architecture and modem operations. The patents acquired by Apple are solely focused on smartphones, with Intel retaining IP relating to applications such as PCs, Internet of Things devices and autonomous vehicles.

Apple is in "advanced talks" to buy the Intel smartphone modem business, the Wall Street Journal reports, allowing the iPhone maker to bring efforts to develop the critical components making a smartphone in-house.

The news is technically not, well, news-- The Information had a similar story little more than a month ago-- but the WSJ's unnamed sources add a deal covering a portfolio of patents and staff worth around $1 billion could be reached as early as next week. Furthermore, Apple has reportedly already been working with the team on a first Chipzilla 5G mobile modem, but failed to create such a component in time.

StorCentric, the parent company of Drobo and Nexsan, announces the acquisition of Retrospect, a privately-owned developer of backup and recovery software aimed at the consumer, professional and SMB markets.

Financial details of the deal are not available.

Retrospect backup and recovery software counts over 500000 customers in around 100 countries. It supports both consumers and SMBs with a range of backup and recovery capabilities, including support for servers, endpoints and virtual environments, as well as integration with over 20 cloud storage providers such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage and Dropbox.

Jony Ive, the longtime Apple product designer behind the iconic aesthetic of what we think of as an "iDevice," announces his shock departure from the company after 30 years to start his own design firm.

The announcement comes through an interview with the Financial Times. Ive says that while he is transitioning to a new creative venture, a design firm dubbed LoveFrom, he will still be very much involved with Apple business, both before and after LoveFrom launches fully in 2020. In fact, Apple will be the very first client of the design company.

"While I will not be an [Apple] employee, I will still be very involved-- I hope for many, many years to come,” Ive tells the FT. “This just seems like a natural and gentle time to make this change.”

In turn, Apple CEO Tim Cook says “Apple will continue to benefit from Jony’s talents by working directly with him on exclusive projects, and through the ongoing work of the brilliant and passionate design team he has built. After so many years working closely together, I’m happy that our relationship continues to evolve and I look forward to working with Jony long into the future.”

Frank Azor, vice president and general manager of Alienware, Gaming and XPS at Dell, announces his departure from the company on 3 July in order to, as he puts it, "take on a new challenge."

Azor is perhaps best known as the co-founder of Alienware before it was acquired by Dell back in 2006. Alienware came about in 1998 following his meeting with "a couple of lunatics," and Azor remained exclusively with the company until 2012, when he moved into other Dell businesses. In 2014 his role at Dell was defined as VP and GM, Alienware, gaming and XPS.

It's official-- the 2018 Pixel Slate is the last tablet from Google, as the search giant confirms it is shifting all hardware team efforts on building laptops, even if it promises to continue supporting the Pixel Slate.

The announcement comes via Twitter from Google Devices & Services SVP Rick Osterloh, who adds the Android and Chrome OS teams are still "100% committed" to working with partners on tablets for all segments of the market, namely consumer, enterprise and education. A number of media outlets also received an official statement stating the exact sentiment, specifically "for Google's first-party hardware efforts, we'll be focusing on Chrome OS laptops and will continue to support Pixel Slate."

Last April Intel announced an exit from the smartphone modem business, following the loss of chief customer Apple. Now The Information reports Apple plans to buy an Intel modem division in order to develop own modem chips.

According to The Information, the Intel modem business is currently not in too good a place. The group is technically spread across the world but its foundation is in Germany, homeland of chipmaker Infineon. Chipzilla acquired the modem operations of Infineon back in 2011 for $1.14 billion, and The Information describes the German division as "one of the strongest pieces of the modem business."

The story is technically not new-- an April 2019 Wall Street Journal report claimed Apple was holding talks with Intel over acquiring "parts" of its modem business in a "potential multibillion-dollar deal." Apparently the talks had started back in Summer 2018 and went on "for months," before screeching to a halt around the time Apple managed to secure a multiyear supply of modems from Intel rival Qualcomm.

Intel heads to Computex 2019 to unveil the long-awaited 10th generation line of Core processors-- the 10nm-based "Ice Lake" range, with a first wave of products aimed at mobile computing applications.

“No one wants to compromise; people want it all-- battery life, performance, responsiveness, connectivity and slick form factors. Our job is to come together as an industry and deliver incredible and differentiated PCs, purpose built to what real people want," Chipzilla says. "10th Gen Intel Core processors-- our most integrated CPU-- and Project Athena are great examples of how our deep investments at a platform level will help fuel innovation across the industry."

The processor range offers models from Core i3 up to i7, with up to 4 cores and 8 threads, up to 4.1 max turbo frequency and up to 1.1GHz graphics frequency. Built using a 10nm process, the chips feature "Sunny Cove" architecture and a Gen11 graphics engine, as well as Deep Learning Boost (DL Boost) technology promising to bring AI technology to PC scale.