Slashdot Mirror
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."
Anyone remember the article from a year or two ago, when it was discovered that Apple was sourcing CPUs for its phones from two different manufacturers, and the phones containing CPUs from one source performed marginally better than the phones contain CPUs from the other source?
There was a big to-do, with people trying to figure out which iPhones were "the good ones", and people who had received (or thought they had received) the slower version were complaining and debating whether they ought to return their "inferior" iPhone in order to get one of the "better" ones.
Of course it turned out the difference wasn't really noticeable unless you were specifically benchmarking for it, but the fact that it was detectable at all produced a big (well, medium-sized) scandal and a headache for Apple.
Given that, I'm not at all surprised that Apple now aims for uniform performance across all units of a given model, rather than for best-possible-performance on any given OEM chipset. Uniformity makes everyone happy, whereas an optimal performance will go unnoticed by the people who have it and the people who don't will be pissed off.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
They're claiming that despite Apple not using all the features of the radio, Qualcomm iPhones still outperform Intel iPhones by 30-75%.
Perhaps Apple did hamstring the Qualcomm chip so that the performance differential to Intel's chipset would be lower, and thus prevent customers from self-selecting the Qualcomm-equipped models. Even so, that's between Apple and its customers. Qualcomm has no place interceding itself in that process.
No? Qualcomm's claims are all there in the filing. Among them:
235. Apple’s Misstatements About the Relative Performance of the
Qualcomm Versus Intel Modems in iPhone 7 and Its Threat Have Harmed
Qualcomm and Consumers. Absent Apple’s conduct, Qualcomm’s chipsets would
be in higher demand, and Qualcomm would be able to sell more chips to Apple to
meet that demand. Apple’s decision not to use Qualcomm’s enhanced chipsets
denied consumers access to higher-performing devices, and Apple’s threats and
other efforts to hide the truth deprived consumers of meaningful choice. And, as
noted above, by choosing not to utilize the higher data rates that Qualcomm’s
chipsets can reach for the Qualcomm-based iPhones, Apple reduces the data
download resources available to other smartphones operating on the network.
236. By choosing not to use the best performing Qualcomm-based iPhones
(and risking that consumers would find out), Apple faced a potential backlash from
its customers. It avoided that backlash by concealing the truth, at the expense of
Qualcomm and consumers alike.
So in other words, Qualcomm is saying that the fact that consumers could not self-select Qualcomm iPhones materially affected its business. It further alleges that consumers were not properly informed, not just because Apple withheld information, but because Apple deliberately misrepresented the facts by stating publicly that the performance of both models was identical.
This isn't the main claim of the lawsuit, though. Qualcomm is alleging Apple interfered with Qualcomm's patent licensing contracts with manufacturers (like Foxconn, Wistron, Pegatron) by encouraging them not to pay the full royalties Qualcomm asks for and not to comply with independent royalty audits. Apple is alleging that Qualcomm's royalty licensing practices are anticompetitive. It'll all go on for years.
Breakfast served all day!