Slashdot Mirror
Apple Is Designing iPhones, iPads That Would Drop Qualcomm Components (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Apple, locked in an intensifying legal fight with Qualcomm, is designing iPhones and iPads for next year that would jettison the chipmaker's components, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple is considering building the devices only with modem chips from Intel and possibly MediaTek because San Diego, Calif.-based Qualcomm has withheld software critical to testing its chips in iPhone and iPad prototypes, according to one of the people. Apple's planned move for next year involve the modem chips that handle communications between wireless devices and cellular networks. Qualcomm is by far the biggest supplier of such chips for the current wireless standard. The Apple plans indicate the battle with Qualcomm could spill beyond the courtroom feud over patents into another important Qualcomm business where it has the potential to send ripples through the smartphone supply chain.
cause company to consider alternatives...
whoodathunkit?
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Apple will not make any business with Qualcomm, will fund or buy better product elsewhere, and will render Qualcomm useless for everyone else.
THIS is what you deserve when you abuse your supplier position asking too much royalties and suing your client to piss them off.
Qualcomm will go bankrupt because they disrespected apple (one of their biggest client) for way too long!
/r/iamverysmart
I'm no designer, but I'd have thought it was better if the components stayed in place.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Fuck the free market, I want a competitive market.
Good on Apple for making sure Qualcomm isn't the only player in the market.
No Qual Comm would mean no CDMA. If they decide to put MediaTek chips for Cellular support it will happen to have the effect of drastically limiting Carrier Support for these devices.
Yes, plz. Slap these hoes back in line!
After the scan-mode-only over-the-air wifi shell code, low-quality poorly-isolated software running on basebands is an unacceptable security risk. They point out that for cell radios the attack surface is larger and the code quality as bad or worse, but it's a less compelling demonstration to exploit them because there are so many old versions and unpatched branches floating around. The blobs that have invaded low-power wifi (hence the exploit), Bluetooth, graphics, and initial program load are also unacceptable. Every blob hides bugs, complicates releases for the overall machine including security fix releases, and creates an asymmetrically weaponized market for exploits since organs of the State get blob source but civilian researchers don't.
You need to start with Intel, though. They are Bitch #0. They're the ones with the secret "management engine" hidden CPU explicitly designed to host rootkits, and the FSP boot blob perfectly crafted to allow NSA persistence in spite of "verified boot." Intel reference design is like Mossad/NSA's wet dream.
Seems like Qualcomm has been busy making enemies everywhere. Not just competitors, but customers and regulators as well.
As the saying goes, "Be careful how you treat people on the way up, you never know who you'll meet on the way back down."
Qualcomm has continued to bully and push around it's customers for years now.
I would think whatever the cost to Apple, it's a net positive.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Back in my HW design days, we would routinely design 2-3x the products with different vendor's chips and either make a business decision to scrap the one(s) not chosen, or if we had the money and resources, bring both to market under the same product name. In a few cases (usually when dealing with Intel) that wasn't possible, there was usually some co-marketing money that demanded separate products, and the design had to be so different anyway that it really wasn't the same product anyhow. But in embedded, it's totally possible. It's not so much about secrecy as it is not putting all your eggs in one basket: sometimes the vendor you want doesn't deliver/has a critical bug/goes belly up, you need to be able to succeed anyway.
I guess no one should treat this as news. We should simply assume that any hardware vendor is going to be designing with multiple options in mind. It's what they go to market with that is interesting (at least to day traders), and that's hard to guess until around launch time unless you have some well placed spies. Very likely most of the HW designers themselves do not know until they get sent to make the sweatshop not screw up.
"Manufacturer, unhappy with vendor, seeks new vendor."
Right, Intel has not gained any points on ARM based processors in the mobile phone market so how do you think this is going to work out for Apple?
What's that saying, Cutting off the nose in spite of the face?
Apple prides itself being the best. (not my personal opinion)
But Qualcomm has proven to be the best. ( it is proven )
So, currently apple slows down the qualcomm chips in their phones in order to be consistent with the slower intel chip.
So, they are willing to install inferior chips to try and make qualcomm bend to their demands.
On the other hand Apple has done what, "invent" round corners?
The iPhone basically defined and popularized what we consider the modern smartphone. The iPad did the same for tablets. They defined and popularized the graphical user interface on desktop PCs as well as quite a few other technologies. Any claim that Apple hasn't invented anything or done any R&D that has improved the industry is simply willful ignorance or foolish spite.
Scoff if you want but someone has to turn those technologies that companies like Qualcomm develop into products that people actually buy. It's hard to argue anybody does a better job of that than Apple. There is a tremendous amount of invention in creating functional integrated products. Not bashing Qualcomm but without Apple they don't have nearly as big a market to sell into. Qualcomm and Apple have different strengths and are sell to different customers bases. Qualcomm sells to other companies and develops technology they can use to make products. Apple sells to individuals and integrates and adapts technology into a coherent product.
Mediatek chips aren't exactly known for their quality.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
apple invented a glorified palm pilot
Which ironically was an Apple Newton done right.
(Palm was initially making graffiti plugin for Apple Netwon, before deciding to try to prove the world they could do a better PDA. They did succeed)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Uh, I was using more fully-featured smart phones years before the iPhone.
Nearly every smartphone since the iPhone has followed the iPhone template and the ones that haven't have failed to find customers. My statement stands You may have had phones with technically more "features" than the early iPhones but not usable ones in most cases. There was NOTHING before the iPhone that was worth a shit for browsing the web and they weren't well integrated devices. The Blackberry did email fairly well but not much else. Nokia was the leading smartphone maker at the time and their smartphones phones SUCKED to actually use. I know because I was using Nokia "smartphones" at the time - they technically had the features but good luck being productive with them. Microsoft's Windows phones were sort of slightly better versions of Palm devices but the interface still sucked. Microsoft was trying to cram desktop windows into a phone form factor and it never worked. Android hadn't really hit the scene yet and the other smartphones out there were more or less inconsequential and sucked.
The only thing they popularized was the touch screen and lack of buttons.
And the apps ecosystem. And multi-touch. And the form factor. And the music store. And MP3 player integration. And usable photo sharing. And google maps (first to use it) and Youtube on a mobile device. And Gorilla Glass. And actual usable web browsing on a smartphone. And virtual assistants (Siri). And visual voicemail. And Facetime. And more. If you think a touch screen and lack of buttons was all they did then you really aren't paying any attention. If you want to criticize Apple there is plenty to pick from but don't trot out that tired nonsense that all they did was round some corners. They weren't the only company doing innovative things but Apple was the company that found the winning formula for the modern smartphone. To pretend otherwise is to deny reality.
Everything else was 2 or 3 steps back from what Win Mo and Blackberry and others were doing.
Not even remotely. I think your recollection of that time period might be a little off. The iPhone basically killed both of those platforms in very short order because it was a better product overall. The early iPhones were competitive right out of the gate unless you were a heavy corporate email user. I don't know if you ever tried to surf the web on a WinMo or Blackberry device of that era but it SUCKED. By the time the iPhone 3G came out it was game over already.
(And in 2017 I still fucking hate the fact that I can't get a physical keyboard on a decent phone.)
You can't get them on a decent phone BECAUSE the keyboard makes it no longer a decent phone. In 2017 most of the rest of us have realized that tiny physical keyboards actually make the device less useful in most cases because of the tradeoffs required to have one (size, screen, etc). I used to think physical keyboards were good too until I really thought about what I give up to have one. If you really want one there are plug in ones available that supposedly work ok. I'm perfectly happy without one and don't really see much point to them anymore on the device in my pocket. I'd rather use the space they take up for a bigger screen, or more battery, or a smaller device.