Apple drops $3.8B joint investment plan with Samsung

Apple has dropped a $3.8 billion joint investment plan with Samsung. The pact had covered flash memory chips used in Apple's music player devices, according to Reuters and the Seoul-based Korean Economic Daily paper, which quoted a senior Samsung official saying that Apple had proposed a joint investment worth about 4 trillion won, but later backed off. The report says that Apple now is in talks with another memory chip maker to produce the chips in the U.S., the official told the newspaper. Earlier this week, Samsung Electronics and its U.S. subsidiary pleaded guilty to price fixing charges and agreed to pay a $300 million fine for taking part in a conspiracy to fix the prices of semiconductors for computers and other electronics, and both companies may be investigated by the Korean government for possible antitrust violations.