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Mark Papermaster, former IBM employee, then hired and fired by Apple, now works at Cisco

Mark Papermaster, former IBM employee, then hired and fired by Apple, now works at Cisco

Mark Papermaster is a man whose name is most commonly associated with the issues that plague the antenna in Apple’s fourth generation iPhone. The 49 year old was picked up by Apple after working at IBM for over 25 years where he was, among other things, Vice President of Microprocessor Technology Development.

This guy was smart, so smart in fact that when Apple tried to hire him IBM filed a complaint against Papermaster in New York’s District Court, citing the Noncompetition Agreement he signed on June 21, 2006. He bagan his career at Apple in October 2008 and got let go in August 2010. While Apple would never say his departure was due to the design flaw in the iPhone 4 antenna, because doing so would admit that there is actually a problem, The Wall Street Journal discovered that it was mainly because of “broader cultural incompatibility” and simply no longer being liked by Steve Jobs that got him kicked out.

Last month Papermaster joined Cisco, the infrastructure giant that powers much of the plumbing that makes the internet works, as Vice President of the Engineering Department. His skills at making power efficient chips will be used to help Cisco make their products more desirable from companies looking to trim their energy bills and project an image of being environmentally conscious.

Apple is a unique competitor in the mobile space because they do almost everything by themselves. They design their own microprocessors, albeit have them manufactured by Samsung from intellectual property acquired from ARM, they design their own OS, their own desktop client, and give developers a platform to make a living off of if they make something other than another fart app. All that doesn’t come cheap, and it’s part of why Apple products are so damn expensive, but we’ve got to wonder … who is designing the chip that’s going in the next iPhone and the one after that?

[Thanks: http://www.intomobile.com]

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