because he was not authorized to speak to the press apple then takes these small teams and assigns them to new projects or pairs them with older teams at appleother deals are made in an effort to quickly blend new technology into existing products for example its 2008 purchase of pa semi a chip maker helped apple design more advanced processors for iphones and ipads and its 2012 acquisition of authentec helped enable the fingerprintsensing technology that eventually wound up in new iphonesother deals are clearly part of apples effort to play catchup in one particular area mapsin 2012 apple updated the builtin maps software for its mobile devices to replace googles mapping data with its own apples maps which were lackluster compared with googles quickly drew scrutiny and timothy d cook apples chief executive issued an apologyto help the company catch up last year it bought embark and hopstop which provide public transit directions and wifislam a company that provided maps for indoor areas apple in previous years acquired three other mapping companies placebase poly9 and c3 technologies maps was a place where they did a lot of acquisitions and that was a product that came out very flat said maynard um a financial analyst for wells fargo they had the option to invest organically to get that product up to speed or go out and acquire other thingsbut just as those acquisitions suggest areas where the company is trying to catch up others offer strong hints about new areas where the company is aiming to be a leaderone of those deals was reached with primesense the chip maker that makes 3d sensors although the companys technology has so far been used mostly for applications on a tv and apple would likely look into similar uses mr bajarin of creative strategies said he expected apple to look far and wide for other uses of the technology possible options he said could include things like turning the iphones camera into a 3d scanner which could send images to be reproduced by a 3d printer for instanceapple has historically never done anything because someone told them to do something mr um said they do what they think is right and they go down that path