The chip biz didn't do as badly as many had feared it might last summer, closing out 2011 with $299.5bn in worldwide sales, up four-tenths of a per cent from the record $298.3bn revenue level set in 2010.?
Chip-maker Micron Technology has named a new CEO following the death of Steve Appleton on Friday in a plane crash.?
The boys from Boise are on a roll after buying the ashes of Virtensys last week - now Idaho-based Micron is chatting up struggling Japanese memory maker Elpida and Taiwan's Nanya to form a 3-way merger.?
Ingram Micro chief exec Greg Spierkel is today standing down after nearly six years in charge.?
Xio, under fresh new executive management, is renewing its assault on computer data centres, convinced that this time, with a better, more focused business structure, it can breach the big data centre citadel walls it has been assaulting time after time.?
OCZ promises to refund purchasers of failed solid-state drives, but at least in one case it seemed unable to do so - until Vulture Central poked its beak in.?
Apple has for the first time released a complete list of its suppliers [PDF], publishing the names of 156 companies who make the parts for everything from Macbook screens to iPad covers.?
And now, after worn-out CES 2012 attendees and exhibitors have stumbled off home in a daze, Wireless Watch presents the five themes that stood out at the week-long celebration of consumerism that you ought to know about.?
CES 2012 At CES Seagate boss Steve Luczo said the company was considering running open market auctions of its disk drives to gauge spot prices and demand.?
Tablet maker Nuevas Tecnologías y Energías Catalá, the company behind one of Apple's rare court defeats, is now taking the fruity tech titan to court for extortion.?
CES 2012 Seventy-five new devices featuring wireless charging will be demonstrated over the next week, with Motorola joining the effort to push the technology over the tipping point.?
OCZ has a new SSD product and brand, Petrol, which uses cheaper asynchronous NAND than last month's Octane with its synchronous NAND.?
Hitachi GST has announced a 900GB small form-factor drive, thus catching up with Seagate's Savvio.?
Apple is rumoured to be considering buying Anobit, a flash controller startup whose signal processing technology makes cheap non-volatile memory as reliable as the more expensive stuff.?
Hynix, which trails Samsung and Toshiba in the flash market, is trying to gain ground on them with a 20 per cent better NAND process.?
Chip maker Intel has slashed its final quarter outlook, admitting it will fall short of the company's previous forecast due to a hard drive supply shortage - sparked by flooding in Thai disk factories.?
More than 1,000 workers at a Hitachi GST-owned disk drive plant are striking over severance pay connected to the Western Digital acquisition.?
Despite the devastating and deadly floods in Thailand, Seagate will spend $30m (£19.1m) to finish building a new disk read-write head plant in the south-east Asian nation.?
Hitachi GST has a 4TB desktop disk drive on sale in Tokyo, although no product announcement has been made. This would be the world's first 4TB internal drive.?
A study of traffic and productivity in Apple?s retail arm makes worrying reading for Cupertino, according to a new analysis by Asymco.?
IHS has slashed PC sales forecasts for 2012 because of weakening demand and an ongoing disk drive crisis.?
GlassHouseTechnologies has for the second time shelved plans for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US due to the uncertain economic outlook.?
After knocking SSDs for poor performance, Fusion-io is now building one itself ? but throwing out existing speed-limiting SSD interfaces designed for disk drives.?
Acer is plotting a return to profits that partly rests on the success of the ultrabook after revealing it is close to completing its operational and management overhaul.?
Samsung is shipping mini-Serial ATA interface solid state drives for ultrabooks, the attempt by Intel to spark a Windows equivalent of MacBook Air thin notebooks into being.?
Flash chip prices are falling thanks to over-supply and slow markets in Europe and the USA.?
Distributors have backed incoming Acer UK boss Neil Marshall to turn the ailing operation around and confine the channel-stuffing saga to history.?
STEC has launched a super long-life SSD capable of having 33PB written to it over a five-year period.?
Manufacturers are cutting their margins to the bone, and getting a subsidy from Intel, in an effort to make ultrabooks more affordable.?
Best Buy may be retreating to its homeland with a bloody nose, but it could yet ruin Dixons Retail's margins this Christmas before it turns off the lights.?
Price comparison site Idealo.co.uk has revealed that disk drive prices were rising by more than 5 per cent a day in the aftermath of the crisis in Thailand that sent supply chains into a tailspin.?
Small resellers continue to drop like flies, with Warwick-based Streamline Computing the latest to cease trading and enter liquidation proceedings.?
HP doesn't have to hand over a secret investigation's report on former chief executive Mark Hurd's sexual activities, or lack thereof, a US Supreme Court ruled.?
World number four PC-maker Acer is focusing on the folk still buying computers and hoping to grow its China sales by 20 to 25 per cent next year.?
Tablet computers need skinnier hard drives to provide more capacity than flash, with flash caches adding speed to the single spinning platter mix.?
Tech Data is cutting costs to reflect the leaner economic climate and in anticipation of modest single digit sales growth over the Christmas quarter.?
PC shortages are affecting the UK earlier than expected but the rapid swing from inventory overload to relative hardware famine has led to some customers dismissing resellers' warnings as sales opportunism.?
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has labelled the public sector's old way of procuring IT products as a "speed dating approach" and added that UK.gov needed to learn from its European neighbours such as Germany and France.?
Azlan has confirmed its revamped management line-up that will lead the business from the start of next month.?
Troubled Acer has penned a new financing deal to cover working capital requirements and pay off a previous loan it took out to acquire Gateway.?
The European Union is set to give Western Digital its blessing to buy Hitachi GST and become the world's biggest hard disk drive manufacturer by far, or so says Reuters.?
Rambus, the litigious memory tech firm, has taken a beating in the stock markets after losing a key case against Micron over price fixing and conspiracy charges.?
The Thai government has dispatched a crack squad of navy divers in a bid to glean WD factory equipment currently lost below metres of flood water.?
Steve Ballmer has scotched suggestions from investors at Microsoft's annual shareholders meeting that his company should spin off some of its divisions?
Asda is trying to drag its price conscious Luddite punters into an internet world this Christmas by chopping the price of its notebooks and mobile broadband.?
A Hitachi and LG optical disk-making joint venture has pleaded guilty to 14 counts of violating antitrust law and one count of wire fraud in the US.?
Beleaguered education IT supplier RM has carved off another piece of international operations with Civica coughing £900,000 for its biz down under.?
Kesa Electricals has coughed £50m to exit its loss-making UK retail arm Comet, with private equity firms Hailey Holdings and Hailey Acquisitions taking on the 248-strong chain.?
Dell's build-to-order business model makes it the most vulnerable to the drive shortages that are wreaking havoc across the industry, channel analyst Context reckons.?
Ultrabooks will give stagnating notebook sales and the wider PC components industry a shot in the arm, but only when prices are chopped, beancounter IHS iSuppli has warned.?