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manufactured in Texas by Apple-owned Fab house, Intrinsity

Intrinsity (back when it existed independent of Apple) was a fabless manufacturer that contracted out to other foundries (including and especially Samsung) to manufacture their chips. Samsung just upgraded its Austin plant for A#-series chip production; Intrinsity never had an Austin plant and Apple hasn't built one.

Rumor has it (ugh...) that Apple was trying to shift assembly to TSMC, but they didn't have the quality/yield.

Hmmm. Interesting. I did not know that! Why would Apple need a fabless semi house? That makes NO sense...

Oh wait! Here's some stuff... I guess I'd always figured that PASemi was responsible for the Axx SoC design. Guess I was only half-right!
HOWEVER, the rest of my post stands. ;-)

The same question could be asked of music player technology, mobile software, and tablet software. MS has had less than stellar success with their internal projects; buying something external that works may have been easier. The ultimate motives of MS are only known to themselves. Remember this is the same MS that tried to buy Yahoo. What was the ultimate purpose of that acquisition?

While the CPU in the iPhone is an "Apple spec" CPU, most likely the radio chipset is from a third party.

Most such third parties offer roughly equivalent GSM and CDMA chipsets (In fact, probably 50%+ of the GSM/UMTS smartphone market is powered by Qualcomm chipsets, despite Qualcomm being the creator and backer of cdmaOne/CDMA2000), making it not too difficult to make a CDMA version of a phone and a GSM version.

Also, you show a fundamental lack of understanding of RF and communications engineering. New band = new antenna. Same bands but different protocol = no new antenna, just a different baseband processor. Therefore, adding T-Mobile's additional band is the least likely route for Apple to go.

Changing the iPhone from GSM/UMTS to CDMA2000 (note: UMTS uses a CDMA modulation scheme, one of the reasons Qualcomm is involved in that market despite them backing a competing protocol/air interface suite - they're good at making CDMA chipsets whether it is the UMTS protocol/air interface suite or CDMA2000) most likely entails:
1) Switch out the baseband processor chip. Note that as I said before, nearly all UMTS chipset providers also provide CDMA2000 chipsets that are very similar and require little engineering
2) Remove the now unneeded SIM slot (what was that about a packed device?)

That's about it

Note: Right now, Apple gets their radio chipsets from Infineon, but there is a lot of evidence pointing to them moving to Qualcomm for the 5th gen iPhone, with the ability to produce a CDMA version being one of a number of reasons, Infineon getting purchased by Intel being a bigger reason - see http://touchreviews.net/iphone-5-qualcomm-radio-chip/ - I don't know about Infineon chipsets, but it is VERY easy to make both a CDMA2000 and GSM/UMTS version of a phone if you use Qualcomm for your radio chipsets, which is why a large portion of HTC's GSM product line have near identical CDMA equivalents.

Compared to the iPhone, Android phones are catching up.

And you obviously read a previous post of mine. The market share of iPhones increased from 30.3% to 32.8% while that of Androids only increased 5.3% to 6.2%. iPhones grew twice as fast as Androids.

If you're going to compare the iPad to anything, compare it to netbooks - which still kick the iPad's butt in sales.

No, I didn't say netbooks run crippled OSes but I did say the iPad does, it runs the iPhone OS which is crippled.

If you're going to compare the iPod Touch to anything

No where in my post you replied to did I say anything about any iPod what so ever. The closest I came was where I included the part of your post where you say, and I included the quote, "Yeah, all told, worldwide, there were more iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads sold than Android phones." I did not compare it to anything.

As to Android tablets: I don't think it's fair to say Android is a crippled OS.

Again I did not say anything like that. I'll repeat what I did say, "If Android tablets are anything like iPads, ie running a crippled OS", iPads run a crippled, but if Android tablet do too then I don't care about them either. I even gave an example of what I wanted in the iPad, the Modbook Pro.

What is so hard to understand and comprehend any of about that?

Falcon

Apple doesn't have a monopoly in the smartphone market. Symbian phones account for 3 times the market share Apple has, and Blackberry phones account for 1.25 times the market share.

You're right, I gave similar figures to the responder above you in my response to him. Apple's iPhone is growing in marketshare though, in May the market share of the iPhone increased from 30.3% to 32.8%, and Androids increased theirs from 5.3% to 6.2%. I've made mistakes in this thread but this is a big one I didn't make: Android Stealing Symbian & WinMo Market Share, but that's from last year, ie old. Looking for recent data I found 2 articles of interest, April 2010 Mobile Metrics Report and Apple iPad Catching Up On Android In OS Market. And the iPad uses the same OS as the iPhone does. However it's not a phone.

Falcon

More Android handsets were activated Q1 2010 than iPhones.

Really? In May the market share for Android increased from 5.3% to 6.2% whereas the iPhone's market share increased 30.3% to 32.8%. Even with it's larger market share the iPhone increased its market share more than Androids did.

Android is making its way in to all kinds of devices, not just phones and PMP's.

And iPhone's OS is in more than just iPhones. Two million iPads, with the same OS, was sold in less than 60 days. How many Androids were sold? According to Garder while 314.7 million smart phones were sold in the first quarter of 2010 the iPhone had the 3rd largest market share with Androids coming in 4th. iPhones increased from 10.5 percent to 15.4 percent whereas Androids increased only 1.6 percent to 9.6 percent.

Falcon

but I didn't think Apple had a monopoly at all. They still have competition from RIM, WinMo, and growing competition from the Android phones.

The iPhone has some competition but it has the largest market share. Another version of the iPhone / Android market share figures has some statistics on the market share of the competition. In May the iPhone market share increased 2.5% from 30.3% to 32.8% while the Androids, with more than one company making handsets, increased from 5.3% to 6.2%. Even though iPhones have leads in both being on the market and in market share, it's markets share increased more than 2 tymes as mush as Androids did. But because its market share is so small Android increased the percentage of handsets sold as a total. TFA I link to says of Android, "Its share growing by 17% in May, while the iPhone's share only grew by 8.25%" Think about it, Android handsets are being released pretty frequently whereas it's been months since the last iPhone update came out, so being the latest it should have better uptake figures but it doesn't.

I was talking about MS and their monopoly on desktop OSes and office software when I was talking about monopolies.

I agree MS has a monopoly in desktop OSes and in office suites but there are others. I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro and for my office suite I use NeoOffice, the native Mac port of OpenOffice.org. Under the desk I have 2 tower PCs, an NT4 and a Linux PC. In storage there's more Windows PCs. I have MS Office on one of them and OpenOffice on others.

Yes, patents severely distort the market. They were a good idea at one time, but they've been completely abused and mutated beyond their original intentions. Software patents in particular are a very bad idea.

I agree. Patents may of served a good purpose at one tyme but they've out lived the good and now hinder progress. And I believe software patents are among the worst ideas economically and for progress.

Falcon

Oh, BTW perhaps using "monopoly" is the wrong word describing iPhones market share, it's nothing like MS's market share of OSes and Office suites. It is however dominate. And while I believe in ending patents I'm not sure about ending copyrights. The duplication and copying of art and literature is easy and cheap whereas duplicating hardware can be expensive. I however believe copyright terms need to be shortened, not lengthened like they have been. The original copyright term was 14 years with one 14 year extension possible. I'd make it 7 years at most with no extension.