Apple is widely known for building iconic devices and breakthrough technology, but did you know some of its most revolutionary features actually started in someone else’s garage? Unlike some tech giants that acquire companies with the aim of eliminating competition, Apple’s approach is highly strategic. It buys companies for two main reasons: to absorb world-class talent and to acquire foundational technology that can be integrated directly into the Apple ecosystem. When Apple buys a brand, that brand’s DNA usually ends up in the pockets of millions of people, even if the original name fades into history.

From the operating system running on your new MacBook Pro M5 to the secure biometrics unlocking millions of iPhones across the globe, much of what we consider uniquely “Apple” was originally invented elsewhere. Some of these acquisitions were massive public spectacles, while others were quiet, behind-the-scenes deals — almost all of them played a role in the transformation of the iPhone over the years. Let’s look back at five legendary tech brands that Apple bought, and shed some light on the immense impact they had.

In 2014, Apple made its largest acquisition to date by cutting a massive $3 billion check for Beats Electronics. Founded by music icon Dr. Dre and legendary producer Jimmy Iovine, Beats was a culture-defining brand famous for its bass-heavy headphones and a budding premium music streaming subscription. While critics initially wondered why a hardware giant like Apple would pay billions for a headphone company, it wasn’t just buying plastic headphones. The deal secured cultural relevance, and more importantly, a means to develop a new breakthrough hardware category. 

The immediate hardware result was a massive upgrade to Apple’s audio lineup, but the true crown jewel of the acquisition came with the introduction of AirPods in 2016. Apple leveraged the expertise of the Beats brand in producing high-quality headphones to make the best-selling wireless earbuds of all time. 

Then, there was the Beats Music streaming platform. Apple took that underlying streaming infrastructure, polished the user interface, integrated it deeply into iOS, and rebranded it as Apple Music in 2015. Today, Apple Music is the default music streaming service for a lot of Apple users. Meanwhile, the Beats brand itself was kept alive as a stylish, bass-forward alternative to AirPods, often used to target fitness enthusiasts and athletes. By absorbing Beats, Apple successfully transitioned from a company that sold digital song downloads on iTunes to a modern streaming powerhouse, and simultaneously cemented its dominance in the premium wireless audio market.

If you’ve ever used Shazam, you know it feels like an absolutely magical experience. Simply hold your phone up to a faint speaker in a noisy cafe, and within seconds, the app will identify the exact song playing. Recognizing its incredible utility, Apple acquired the U.K.-based company in 2018 for an estimated $400 million. For users, the most immediate and welcome change after the acquisition was Apple’s decision to strip out all third-party advertisements, making the app entirely free, clean, and fast to use. But Apple didn’t just leave Shazam as a standalone app; it seamlessly integrated its music recognition technology into iOS.

As a result, now you don’t need to download anything recognize the music playing around you with an iPhone. You can simply say, “Hey Siri, which song is playing?” or tap the dedicated Shazam toggle right from the iOS Control Center. This acquisition also served as a massive data engine for Apple Music. By analyzing what millions of people are Shazam-ing in real time across the globe, Apple could predict upcoming musical trends and feed its recommendation algorithm to keep users hooked. It stands as a perfect example of Apple taking a beloved utility and scaling its backend technology to strengthen its broader services ecosystem. Despite the acquisition, Shazam is still available on Android, albeit as a third-party app that needs to be installed via the Google Play Store.

If one acquisition saved Apple from the brink of total collapse, it was the purchase of NeXT in 1997. After leaving Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs founded NeXT to build high-end computers aimed at students, universities, and businesses. While the company’s hardware didn’t sell in massive quantities, the object-oriented operating system it built, called NeXTSTEP, was decades ahead of its time. By the late 1990s, Apple’s own operating system was comparatively ancient, and the company was months away from bankruptcy.

The impact of this acquisition cannot be overstated. The foundations of the software running on pretty much all of Apple’s current devices trace back back to this single deal. Apple took the advanced architecture of NeXTSTEP and used it to build Mac OS X, which we now know as macOS. The core software framework, file structures, and development tools created at NeXT were so robust that they eventually became the structural foundation for iOS, watchOS, and tvOS as well. If you look under the hood of a modern iPhone or Mac today, you may still find code paradigms stemming directly from NeXTSTEP. 

Furthermore, the deal brought back Steve Jobs, who took the reins as CEO and launched the most historic turnaround in business history, bringing us the iMac, iPod, and iPhone, among other groundbreaking products.

When Apple unveiled the iPhone X in 2017, the tech world was stunned by the removal of the then iconic home button, a staple feature of the iPhone since its first generation. The removal also meant that TouchID was now gone, but Apple introduced FaceID to replace it. This new biometric authentication method unlocked the phone by scanning a user’s face instead of fingerprints was made possible because Apple quietly acquired Israeli 3D sensing company PrimeSense back in 2013.

Before Apple bought the company, PrimeSense was most famous for partnering with Microsoft to create the original Xbox Kinect. While the Kinect was a bulky camera meant to sit on top of a television, Apple’s hardware engineering teams worked tirelessly for years to shrink PrimeSense’s optical technology down to miniature scale. The company successfully crammed the complex hardware system into the tiny notch at the top of the iPhone screen. PrimeSense’s advanced computer vision technology allows the iPhone to project over 30,000 invisible infrared dots to create a precise depth map of your face. This acquisition gave Apple a massive multi-year lead over Android competitors in secure facial recognition, transforming a gaming gimmick into the gold standard of mobile biometric security.

In 2008, Apple made a quiet move that would alter the course of the entire semiconductor industry in the years to come: it acquired boutique chip design startup P.A. Semi for $278 million. At the time, P.A. Semi was highly regarded for designing incredibly power-efficient microprocessors. While one may have wondered at the time why the company needed its own chip designers, especially when Samsung provided its ARM-based chips for most phones, Steve Jobs had a visionary long-term goal. He realized that if Apple wanted to truly control the performance, battery life, and feature set of its mobile devices, it couldn’t rely on off-the-shelf processors from third-party manufacturers.

The P.A. Semi team formed the elite core of Apple’s new in-house silicon division. Just two years later, Apple debuted the A4 chip in the original iPad and iPhone 4, marking the birth of Apple Silicon. Since then, these custom A-series chips have consistently outperformed the competition, giving iPhones unmatched speed and battery efficiency. Even to date, the A19 Pro chip on the iPhone 17 Pro is right up there at the top in terms of performance and battery life. The expertise gained from this acquisition didn’t stop at mobile phones. It laid the groundwork for the revolutionary ARM-based M-series chips that power modern Macs today. By buying P.A. Semi, Apple successfully broke free from its dependence on external chipmakers, gaining total vertical integration and a massive competitive advantage that rivals are still struggling to match.