Apple to drop Samsung for CPUs

Apple's latest iPhone 5 has hit the streets, but what many people don't know is that most of the phone is actually made by Samsung. Samsung fabricate the CPU and make the display and also many of the wireless chips (they used to be made by Cambridge Silicon Radio/CSR, but Samsung acquired their chip division). Apple are moving chip fabrication away from Samsung and their A7 chip will be fabricated by TSMC (or other fab plant), though they may not completely remove themselves from Samsung as they have a production line set-up for the A6. Samsung contributed both design and technology expertise to Apple's earlier CPUs but now much of this expertise has been taken in-house and Apple just require a silicon fab to actually manufacture their new CPUs. The A6 was almost entirely engineered in-house by Apple. This will be a blow to Samsung as they struggle to fill the production lines at their fabs.

Llustre becomes uk.fab.com

Fab launched in June 2011 and to celebrate it's first birthday it is now launching uk.fab.com with the acquisition of Llustre. Fab has grown to over 5m people in 20 countries and has relationships with over 5,000 designers. Sales of items ranged from $1 to $20,000 and it has sold over 1.8m products. Llustre started life in October 2011 and launched in April 2012 and has grown rapidly to become a destination site for interior design flash sales in the UK and has already gained more than 500 design partners. Maria Molland (ex Thomson Reuters) will take on the role of Chief European Officer, while Tracy Doree (CoFounder of Llustre) will work for Maria as Managing Director of Fab UK and head of UK Merchandising and Vivianne Bearman (C-Founder Llustre) will lead the UK Product & Operations. Fab and Llustre have both grown phenomenally and the combined company can only do better.