Qualcomm Says Apple Broke Contract, Hindered Performance of Its Chipsets (arstechnica.com)

Qualcomm has filed a 139-page rebuttal of a lawsuit lodged by Apple in January in which the US chipmaker counterclaimed that the iPhone giant was "misrepresenting facts and making false statements." From a report on ArsTechnica: It alleged that Apple had "breached" and "mischaracterized" deals it had in place with Qualcomm and accused the Tim Cook-run firm of interfering with the chipmaker's "long-standing agreements" with iPhone and iPad manufacturers, such as Foxconn. In a statement, Qualcomm said, "Apple effectively chose to limit the performance of the Qualcomm-based iPhones by not taking advantage of the full potential speed of which Qualcomm's modems are capable. Apple's actions were intended to prevent consumers from realizing that iPhones containing Qualcomm chipsets performed far better than iPhones containing chipsets supplied by Intel."

Comments

Re:Wait wot? What about the Nexus 4?

[Garfong]

Because despite the terrible summary, the claim isn't about Apple hindering the performance of its chips. It's about Apple claiming there's no discernible difference between Intel & Qualcomm iPhones. The section about hindering performance is a couple of paragraphs of background in a multi-hundred page document, but for some reason the press has latched onto it.

Re:Abusive monopoly mad, news at 11.

[clonehappy]

Everyone knows the qualcomm LTE modems are better under optimal conditions but I feel Apple is more interested in providing a constant experience across it's platform.

That's the problem, under optimal conditions the performance IS consistent between the two modems. However, as the signal level starts to drop, the Intel modem's performance drops off a cliff. It's the real-world experience that suffers using Intel modems, not the lab tests.

I understand Apple's desire to cheap out on the modems to squeeze a dime from a business perspective. However, they position the iPhone as a premium product and using sub-par chips that provide sub-par performance will give consumers the opposite idea. If Apple was concerned with having a consistent user experience, they wouldn't be using Intel modems at all.

Re:It's the CPU-flavors thing all over again

[AmiMoJo]

Problem for Qualcomm is that it makes their chips look as bad as Intel ones, when they are actually quite a bit better. All that because Apple wants to second source everything to avoid part manufacturers doing what it does to it does to them.

They could do what Samsung does. Different models for different parts of the world. The Galaxy S line usually has different CPUs and modems in different markets.