Qualcomm Sues Apple Contract Manufacturers (reuters.com)
Qualcomm on Wednesday sued the manufacturers that make iPhones for Apple for failing to pay royalties on the chip maker's technology, widening its legal battle with the world's most valuable company. Qualcomm's lawsuit, filed Wednesday in a federal district court in San Diego, accuses Compal, Foxconn, Pegatron, and Wistron of breaching longstanding patent-licensing agreements with Qualcomm by halting royalty payments on Qualcomm technology used in iPhones and iPads. From a report: Apple sued Qualcomm in January, accusing it of overcharging for chips and refusing to pay some $1 billion in promised rebates. Qualcomm said in the complaint that Apple is trying to force the company to agree to a "unreasonable demand for a below-market direct license." Qualcomm said last month that Apple had decided to withhold royalty payments to its contract manufacturers that are owed to the chipmaker, for sales made in the first quarter of 2017, until the dispute is resolved in court. "While not disputing their contractual obligations to pay for the use of Qualcomm's inventions, the manufacturers say they must follow Apple's instructions not to pay," Qualcomm said in a statement on Wednesday.
Because Qualcomm, like ARM, does not actually manufacture chips to sell to the likes of Apple or Samsung. Their business is to sell the design that companies like TSMC manufactures for Apple. They make a small number of them for demo/prototype purposes but not for general sale.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Qualcomm certainly makes the Snapdragon line of SOCs which are used by the millions in many phones. But in this case Apple is not using the Snapdragon instead they have their own in-house SOC.
Because
1 Qualcomm only designs not makes
2) Qualcomm was getting paid royalties by tsmc and other manufactures that made Apple products but then wanted Apple to pay a second time for the same royalty because it was in the iPhone. They have spent years fighting this and Apple finally told their suppliers to stop paying those royalties too. That is to bring qualcom to the negotations table trying not to double and triple dip. Expect Apple to win but be forced to pay royalties up to the time those suppliers stopped. Which is only fair.
Patent holding companies (qualcom) like isps want to get paid two three times on the same product. And are fighting very hard to do that. Htc and Motorola don't have to pay twice for the same chipset only Apple does.
The whole point of net neutrality is to stop isps from charging content providers for delivering content that their customers asked for.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.