The ARM website was where I found out about the empeg.

How many expected ARM to be the powerhouse that it's become? It sounded good to me all those years ago, but I don't think I had any idea that their tech would power so many devices.

Seems depressing on the surface to lose another UK company, but UK businesses seem to flourish under foreign ownership, and we do seem keen to sell anything...

I find it a bit baffling that they'd sell themselves when they seem to be doing a fine job of making money with excellent prospects of making more in the future.

There was some verbiage in there about them hoping somebody else arrives with a better bid. The deal isn't final yet. That leaves a bunch of room for speculation on other possible buyers. The thing is that a big part of ARM's value is that they're something of a Switzerland, in that they're neutral and will license to anybody. ARM chips roll off multiple foundries, designed/integrated by multiple third-parties. So, yeah, Apple could certainly outbid anybody, if they wanted to, but then other ARM licensees (Broadcom, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc.) would go nuts, maybe get serious about some sort of alternative to ARM like Berkeley's RISC V.

Whoever does the buying, the team in the U.K. will presumably still stay put and continue doing their thing. Who knows, maybe they'll even get additional resources from the new buyer and then hire more people, etc.

Why would they need to hire more people?

If the new buyer has new plans for global domination, that could well mean expanding the ARM product line in some fashion. Maybe they add a GPU team or they otherwise start offering "ARM-optimized IP" for third-party SoC integrators or maybe they buy out other third-party IP vendors, to achieve the same effect. The sky's the limit if your goal is to maximize revenue and you don't care about pissing anybody off.

I think it's an absolute disaster for the UK.

Weirdly, only at the weekend I dug out my "Acorn Risc Machine Family Data Manual" as I was explaining to my wife about ARM and where it had come from, then this happened a few days later.

It would probably be a bit sour for Apple to put in a huge rival bid for it anyway considering they owned 50% of it at one time.

There must be some kind of plan for world domination as they reckon they'll be employing 1000s more people, but how many big tech companies do we have left?

Surprised Mike Lynch didn't do something big after Autonomy.