Apple? They can afford it, and have already demonstrated interest in having their own chips. At the current valuation, it'd not cost much more than ATi did when AMD bought them.
Well Apple is certainly an interesting choice, and maybe if this happened like 2 years ago, they might've done it, too. However, I think they are too far along building their ARM SoC for Macs right now, and it would take them more than 2 years to put AMD's chips on the right track. Plus, if Apple bought them, would they even be allowed to keep them for themselves? Wouldn't that mean Intel would remain the only competitor in x86 for Windows devices?
Having ATI's GPU on their SoC might be an upgrade. I am not convinced the Mac line will move to the ARM because of bootcamp and Microsoft's restrictions on ARM platforms.
I don't know how much Apple really cares about the ability to run Windows on their hardware. I always had the impression that Bootcamp was done just as a bonus because it was easy to do, not because they saw dual-booting as something essential. Even if they did, that whole area is waning fast. I wouldn't be surprised if they tossed Bootcamp aside without a second thought.
Apple would be dropping the ball if they went to ARM, especially on all the people using MS products. Not to mention they would essentially destroy the businesses of Vmware Fusion & Parallels for their virtualization environments which many many people still use to this day in large enterprise organizations to maintain a dual-environment compatibility layer. If they want to throw out their enterprise market, then this will be a great way to go about doing it.
I think they know how many machines are using bootcamp or VMWare / Parallels and it isn't a small percentage. These are the gateway products that allow a lot of folks to buy a Macintosh.
