So after a couple of weeks of on-again and of-again rumors that Apple was acquiring Beats Electronics, a maker of boutique headphones, the transaction has been officially announced. The figures mentioned a $3.2 billion purchase price, but new reports appeared the day ahead of the announcement that Apple had knocked down the final price to $3 billion. The actual transaction involves $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in stock according to Apple’s press release.

That said, this would still be Apple’s most expensive acquisition, ever, far eclipsing the 1996 acquisition of NeXT that brought Steve Jobs back to the company. That deal was valued at an estimated $429 million, which would be over $651 in 2014 dollars, but still Apple’s largest single acquisition until Beats came along. Of course a few billion dollars isn’t much compared to Apple’s huge war chest, but the critics have been out in force railing against the deal.

The largest question has been why?

While Beats headphones, ear buds and such are quite popular, particularly with millennials, reviews in the tech media have been mixed. Some complain of boomy bass and a general mushy character to the sound, which may appeal to hip-hop fans I suppose, while others extoll the virtues of the latest versions, which have supposedly been “revoiced” to provide a more realistic sonic signature.

So we have the Studio Wireless getting four stars and general accolades from CNET, while the Executive noise-canceling headphones are rated tops in that category by Consumer Reports. The day after the Apple deal was confirmed, Beats announced an update to its Solo line, the Solo², promising better comfort and superior, wider-range audio. It does seem the company is trying to move past the the bass-heavy character of the original products.

Regardless, clearly Apple isn’t buying Beats just to sell fancy headphones. There are a number of quality audio makers who can do as well or better, even if the products don’t carry the buzz of Beats by Dre. Apple CEO Tim Cook is clearly impressed with Beats Music, a streaming service that uses live curators, consisting of DJs and musicians, in addition to computer algorithms to put together playlists for you. Although the service may have only a bit more than 100,000 members according to some reports, a proper Apple marketing campaign would boost the numbers real fast.

As with FileMaker, Beats will run as a separate brand, which means that, in the near term, not much will change. Over time, though, you’ll no doubt see various forms of integration between the Apple and Beats products and services.

But the most important advantage in this deal appears to be the two new employees who will be working under Eddy Cue, Apple’s Internet services chief, consisting of Beats co-founders Jimmy Iovine, a powerhouse music executive and producer, and Dr. Dre, a famous rapper.

Now Dr. Dre may have spilled the beans prematurely, when he announced in public at a party recently that he had become the first billionaire hip-hop artist. Some estimates, however, put his fortune at somewhat less than that figure after taxes. But when your net worth is that high, what’s a few hundred million among friends?

Iovine had a long personal history with Steve Jobs, and is said to have helped in crafting some of the early music contracts that helped establish iTunes as the world’s largest music download service. So one would expect that he’d help Cue make the difficult deals. But the fledgling Beats Music service is also a key factor. Supposedly growth of digital music sales has been stalled by the rise of Spotify and Pandora. In contrast, Apple’s first foray into the music streaming game, iTunes Radio, has gotten at best tepid reviews.

Although Beats Music will run separately, at least at the start, one expects the technology and musical expertise will infuse iTunes Radio with better quality playlists.

I suppose you can’t just look at the surface in trying to assess the value of this deal. After all, Apple does a lot of things in secret, and there are no doubt long-range plans being devised by Apple and the Beats crew that we know nothing about. It may expand the Beats moniker into other businesses too. Remember that Chrysler uses Beats technology for some of its infotainment systems, and I wonder how that will play out in the future. Would Apple want to attempt to license that technology to other auto makers in competition with Bose, Infinty and other companies who build premium sound systems? This might represent a huge enhancement over CarPlay, which is just an AirPlay-style feature that offers closer integration with recent iPhones and your car.

It’s also hard to know how long this deal was in the works. Last September, Beats ended its partnership with a smartphone maker, HTC, in a transaction involving a $265 million buyback. The move ostensibly came when HTC moved to a different audio technology, but you wonder whether it was fueled, in part at least, by ongoing talks with Apple. There’s also a deal between Beats and HP to supply audio technology in note-books that’s reportedly due to expire at the end of the year, although HP has distribution rights through 2015.

In any case, we may or may not hear more about the Beats deal at the WWDC next week, where the rumors persist that Iovine and Dr. Dre will take the stage. Still, the skeptics will continue to wonder what the fuss was all about, unless and until we have a closer look at some of the as-yet-unknown fruits of this transaction.

Yet there is one more question: Would Steve Jobs have made a similar transaction given the opportunity? Or is this the latest evidence of how Tim Cook is putting his own unique stamp on Apple?

Apple CEO Tim Cook and HP CEO Meg Whitman have one thing in common. Both took their positions in the late summer of 2011. The similarities pretty much end there.

Cook had previous experience as interim CEO of Apple when Steve Jobs took several sick leaves. During that time, Apple achieved record sales and profits, and it was almost a given that he’d replace Jobs should the need arise.

Whitman was a member of HP’s board of directors when she was elevated to the top spot in the wake of the miserable performance of her predecessor, Leo Apotheker. It also seemed that HP had been plagued by a growing number of bad decisions since its heyday in the 1990s, and just hadn’t arrived at a viable strategy for coping with the 21st century. You almost felt that the company’s actions were in desperate response to the actions of the competition.

The previous year, HP bought Palm, the company that pioneered the Palm Pilot, but had fallen on hard times, particularly after the arrival of the iPhone and the iPad. It was a pretty cheap deal overall, with the acquisition valued at $1.2 billion. The first notable product arising from this deal, the TouchPad tablet, crashed and burned within weeks, and HP desperately tried to unload unsold inventory for a mere $99. Palm’s WebOS was later spun off as HP tried to undo this tragic mistake.

WebOS, however, isn’t quite dead. It powers LG’s “smart” TVs nowadays, and actually garnered some pretty favorable reviews when Palm was still around.

When Whitman took control of HP, she quickly moved to cancel the plans to spinoff the PC division. Today’s HP appears, at first glance, to be pretty much the same HP that Whitman inherited, but the head count is substantially less.

This month, Whitman announced plans to fire another 11,000 to 16,000 employees. That, on the heels of previous reductions, would mean that between 40,000 and 50,000 will have lost their jobs as of the end of the year. But HP is huge, and this represents a “mere” 15% of the global workforce.

It may well be that HP had grown fat as a senior citizen in the tech business, but Whitman’s long-term strategy is still not terribly clear. Don’t forget that HP essentially created Silicon Valley, and had been known for building best-of-breed gear. In the old days, when I wanted a first rate scanner, it was an HP. Ditto for a high-quality printer. Indeed, I have an HP all-in-one, the OfficeJet 8600 Pro Plus, which delivers good output on text and photos, and also uses less costly ink than most competitors. It’s also solid, reliable, and pretty fast as inkjet printers go.

But when it comes to new strategies to turn around the company, and help it grow despite the slowdown in PC and printer sales, it doesn’t seem as if Whitman has a clue. While she had previously helped build eBay into a large and successful company, her foray into the world of politics was stillborn. Her expensive and high-profile campaign for governor of California failed, despite spending over $144 million of her own money to defeat Jerry Brown in 2010.

What is HP’s next act?  A good question. Firing people might be good for a company’s bottom line if it doesn’t hurt efficiency and productivity. But what about a long-range plan?

With Tim Cook’s Apple, the story is quite different. Apple may not be quite the growth powerhouse it once was, and the stock price has only recently begun to climb back towards historic highs, but the company was in great shape when Cook took over. Yes, Steve Jobs was a hard act to follow, but Apple has barely missed a beat in upgrading the key and most profitable products. Despite complaints that the improvements were iterative rather than revolutionary, you cannot say that about the Mac Pro.

All right, it’s quite true that Apple has, so far at least, not fulfilled the promise of entering new markets, but that isn’t expected to begin to occur until next week’s WWDC, where new OS versions will be demonstrated, and perhaps there will be some surprises.

But the long-rumored iWatch and Apple TV refreshes probably won’t occur until fall, and thus the critics will remain skeptical. Apple’s financial maneuvers, such as share buybacks and the forthcoming stock split, have also gotten praise from Wall Street. Those moves do not appear to be gimmicks to divert attention from the supposed lack of revolutionary products.

Remember that, after Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997, it took four years for the iPod and the release version of OS X to arrive. If you judge Cook by that standard, he still has some time to make good on his promises. While some have called for Cook’s head, because he’s not a product guy, Apple has a bench of creative people that is considered unparalleled in the industry, and there’s no indication the company is in any trouble at all. Sales and revenue are high, and the cash pile continues to grow.

Unless some unpredicted bad things happen, Cook should do well with Apple. Whitman? I’m still waiting for a viable strategy, and just doing the same old thing with fewer people is not a strategy. It’s just a way to cut expenses and hope the products, support and services won’t suffer. It’s not a turnaround strategy by any means beyond a desperate way to deal with the fact that PC sales will continue to erode.

It’s not a novel idea. Apple has done so much to enhance the performance if iPhones and iPads using customized ARM chips. When it comes to Macs, Apple remains at the mercy of a third-party company. When the Motorola/IBM alliance failed to deliver the goods nearly a decade ago, Apple went to Intel. But the next generation of Intel chips, better known as Broadwell, has been delayed until the latter part of the year, which means new Macs will probably be delayed as well.

Sure, there was a modest update to the MacBook Air, using a slightly more powerful Haswell chip. The performance change is insignificant in the scheme of things, but paying $100 less could surely jumpstart Mac sales for the spring and summer. Or at least till something better comes along.

Meantime, an old rumor has become new again, that Apple is testing Macs using multicore ARM chips, perhaps as a future replacement should Intel’s roadmap not deliver the goods. This isn’t to say Intel’s processors are bad. But recent generations have emphasized power efficiency over improved number crunching. Sure integrated graphics are far better, but the overall benchmark improvements aren’t significant, or even noticeable, for the majority of Mac and Windows users.

In recent years, Apple has spent an estimated billion dollars in recent years acquiring chip design technology. You’ve seen it bear fruit in the A-series processors, particularly the A7 with 64-bit capability. Apple boasts it’s a “desktop class” processor, and that surely fuels speculation that it might turn up in a future Mac.

In the scheme of things, however, the A7 is nowhere near as powerful as a Haswell mobile processor. It’s getting better, but it may take a while for ARM technology, with Apple’s help, to catch up. If it does, maybe Apple might consider moving the Mac platform, aside from the Mac Pro, to ARM.

But it won’t be a casual move. Apple has done the processor-switching thing twice before and it wasn’t easy. Yes, porting OS X to ARM is not an issue, since the iOS led the way. But what about the tens of thousands of apps optimized for Intel? How well do they translate? This is a key issue that the rumors barely touch.

Apple’s solution would, in the near-term, probably be some sort of on-the-fly translation capability. Although the feature expired beginning with OS 10.7 Lion, Rosetta was the tool that allowed PowerPC apps to run on Intel Macs with decent performance. Not as good as native apps, but good enough for most purposes until developers had time to upgrade their products. Of course, some never bothered, but that’s another story.

In moving to ARM, Apple would have to offer a similar capability, and one that’s processor based would present the least performance hit. Indeed, the first ARM-based Macs, should they appear, would likely have to offer performance that represents a fairly decent improvement over Intel, partly  to overcome the speed loss for translated apps.

But Apple wouldn’t make this move out of hubris. The A-processor roadmap would have to demonstrate a reasonable boost in performance and power efficiencies over what Intel is doing. The ARM architecture has come a long way, but nobody can say an iPad, snappy as it seems with those slim iOS apps, can approach even the lowly MacBook Air or Mac mini.

There is also the Mac Pro factor. Even of Apple can build a chip that offers good performance on an iMac doesn’t mean it will be powerful enough to match a Xeon, a cost-no-object chip for workstation and server use.

So what’s behind those Mac-on-ARM rumors?

Perhaps some of it is wishful thinking. It may also be true that there are indeed ARM-based Mac prototypes out there undergoing tests. I’d be surprised if there weren’t. But a prototype doesn’t necessarily represent a finished product. This may simply be an ongoing process with Apple considering options for the future.

After all, OS X on Intel was tested for several years before the processor switch was announced in 2005. During his WWDC keynote that year, in fact, Steve Jobs famously showed a satellite photo of the Apple facility in which the OS was under development. The revelation confirmed rumors that had been around for several years.

To be sure, Apple’s processor team is certainly working on chips that will be released for several years, and it may well be that, in a lab setting at any rate, there is an ARM processor that is fully capable of matching what is expected to arrive from Intel. Moving a prototype to a finished product, however, doesn’t happen overnight, and this is the sort of complicated move that would require careful thought, careful testing, and a long-range plan to actually occur.

Regardless of how it turns out, I have no doubt Apple could accomplish a successful ARM transition. The Intel example, where Macs migrated to the new processor faster than even Apple predicted, is an example of how well these turnovers can be accomplished.

Right now, though, I expect any testing with the ARM architecture is done more to have an alternative than as a potential final move for the Mac platform. It may happen, but it won’t occur that quickly unless Apple has achieved a design miracle or two that we know nothing about. Sure, one can speculate about the ARM switch as a potential “one more thing” revelation during a WWDC for this year, or the next. That doesn’t mean it’ll happen, so don’t make too much of the latest rumors.

You don’t have to spend much time with your favorite search engine to find loads of articles about what Apple might launch at the WWDC. Certainly the question about new operating systems is the given, but it’s fascinating to see what directions the next versions of iOS and OS X might take.

So with OS 10.10, regardless of what popular California place name Apple uses — and Malibu would be nice if it weren’t for a certain car that has reserved that name — there is a lot of chatter that the interface will at last be overhauled in the spirit of iOS. Certainly this can be controversial, as some believe Apple is moving too far to make the desktop OS seem more like the mobile OS.

But changing a bunch of artwork doesn’t mean the OS is all that different. Remember the jump from Mac OS to OS X. Yes, some things were controversial, such as the way the Apple menu was overhauled, but most things worked pretty much the same. That meant that what you learned about using Macs as far back as 1984 didn’t change that much in 2001 when the OS went Unix.

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