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Intel Breaks Qualcomm's Hold On Apple's Baseband Chips (wsj.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader randomErr writes: In a big blow to Qualcomm, Apple plans to incorporate Intel baseband chips into at least some models of the new iPhone 7. The selection of Intel chip means that in newer iPhones Apple will no longer support CDMA technology popularized by Qualcomm. The Wall Street Journal states that many industry analysts believe Intel could be supplying as many as half of of baseband chips for Apple's handsets.
This was the last key iPhone component that didn't have two sources, and the Journal estimates that Intel's revenues could now increase by up to $700 million before the end of 2016.
This was the last key iPhone component that didn't have two sources, and the Journal estimates that Intel's revenues could now increase by up to $700 million before the end of 2016.
They have to - Verizon and Spring still need to finish deploying more GSM/LTE spectrum before they can finally abandon CDMA. Until then Apple still has to buy chips from Qualcomm for phones sold into Verizon/Sprint customers. The difference for the 7/7+ is that Apple has a GSM/LTE-only SKU that uses the Intel chips, for AT&T and T-Mobile (and global) customers.
Personally, I always thought that the US should use the standard international bands. It makes buying foreign phones a huge pain.
Need i say more?
Competition in theory is a great idea, but in this case the non-overlapping standards only hurt us consumers with carrier lock-in ( in many cases )
Removing the headphone jack perpetuate's Apple's vertical ecosystem and lock-in.
Using chips tied to one carrier or the other's network perpetuates the carrier's lock-in, and sells more iPhones when people want to switch networks.
The sad part is this latter move undoes years of hard effort Apple's made in the 4 previous phone generations at altering the landscape of American cellephony to get consumers some much-needed network independence.
g=
And is actually the primary reason to avoid this generation.
Why is that? I bought a T-Mobile version. It will work fine across the U.S.. It will work fine when traveling internationally. So why should I avoid the phone because they have two models?
The loss of the headphone jack is a money grab
People who believe that theory are dumber than a bag of hammers. If tit were a money grab Apple would not ship each phone with an adaptor... DUH.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
GSM was based on TDMA - everyone gets an equal timeslice of the bandwidth, even if they don't actually use it. In CDMA, everyone gets an orthogonal code and broadcasts whenever they want to. Broadcasts by other phones raise the noise floor for your phone. SNR then scales depending on how many people are transmitting at any given time, and all the bandwidth gets distributed automatically and equally between only those transmitting at that time.
TDMA was fine for voice. But when it came to high-speed data, GMS simply couldn't compete with CDMA's superior bandwidth allocation. They threw in the towel after a year - most implementations of 3G on GSM used wideband CDMA. They just named it UMTS, HSPA+, etc. because of sour grapes. This is why you could talk and use data at the same time on GSM phones - they had a TDMA radio for voice (still do), and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones used the same radio for voice and data (which were built on different protocols since voice was about a decade older) so couldn't do both simultaneously.
Most LTE implementations are OFDMA - does the same thing as CDMA, except using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. OFDMA requires more processing power to separate out the individual broadcasts, which is why it came after CDMA. Early OFDMA implementations like WiMax sucked up too much power with processors of the time, and would drain a cell phone battery in about 2-3 hours. It wasn't until a few years ago that low-power processors allowed us to implement OFDMA while not requiring a recharge halfway through the day. But CDMA was pretty much the proof of concept needed to make OFDMA a reality. Before CDMA, nobody knew if a real-life cellular network with hundreds of devices broadcasting simultaneously using orthogonal signaling would actually work or scale like theory said it would.
If the people saying the U.S. should've adoopted GSM had gotten their wish, our cellular data speeds today would probably be down below 1 Mbps. When a competitor introduces a far-superior product, it forces the other players in the market to improve, instead of sitting on their asses not improving things because people are paying them anyway. Now that LTE is becoming ubiquitous, loss of CDMA would be less of an issue. But any phone built without CDMA will not be able to fall back to 3G data in most areas of the world.
Intel recently completely (allegedly) gave up on getting IA cores into mobile phones.
Who gives a tuppence about the baseband - Intel isn't selling CherryTrail to iPhone - and Qualcomm has a massive presence in mobile.
Intel spent the best part of 10 years navel gazing about IA in mobile phones, subsidising to beat the band to have a 'presence' - after selling XScale at just the wrong time and then stubbornly/stupidly continuing to refuse to make a high end Arm SoC for mobile. Intel bought it's way into the baseband market too - how long until the baseband industry moves on from Intel's comfort zone in baseband - and we see Intel (again) trying to educate the market with some older/unwanted baseband technology ?
BK wake the fuck up and make a competitive Arm SoC for mobile...
The adapter is free. How does Apple make money on free adaptors again, which they pay to make BTW. So they make and give away hundreds of millions of adaptors, and sell maybe 10000 more BT headsets... spending tens of millions to make hundreds of thousands. HMM.
Do you even know how money works?
Bag of hammers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thanks for describing this in good detail, although I'm bound to forget the IS-95 stuff.
So once Verizon and Sprint switch over to a complete LTE rollout, does that imply that any LTE phone will work w/ them - just slip a SIM in? Like right now, I have a Lumia 550 which I use internationally, but not in the US, since it's not supported by Verizon. But if Verizon and Sprint did go full LTE, would all LTE phones automatically be supported by Verizon and Sprint just as easily as they are by AT&T and T-Mobile? In other words, would one be able to just buy any LTE phone, get a Verizon/Sprint SIM and be good to go?
Yes, and in fact you can already do this if you are in areas with LTE coverage.