Gartner announced today that Apple became the world's biggest buyer of semiconductors in 2011, leaping ahead of both Samsung Electronics and Hewlett-Packard. As Macworld notes, PC and phone vendors' semiconductor spending is related to sales of their finished products. Apple's spending on semiconductors was a whopping US$17.3 billion in 2011, up from $12.8 billion the year before. Samsung was in second place at $16.7 billion and saw a grow
