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.

Comments

Re:No Qual Comm would mean no CDMA.

[peragrin]

Cdma is being phased out anyway for LTE. It just means that Verizon will accelerate plans to phase out and shut down the cdma towers iin favor of the faster 4g LTE ones. (Which they are doing anyways)

Qualcomm is so far in the wrong here it isn't even funny. They are trying to charge Apple two to three times for the same patent just because Apple has deep pockets. If no one else has to pay twice for the same patent. Not HTC not Nexus and Google.

Re:Qualcomm deserve to die

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is getting some of its own medicine, really, and Apple doesn't like it. To be honest, Qualcomm will be fine supplying its chips to other manufacturers, resulting in lots of different phones having faster network support than the iPhone of the year. Not a big deal for Qualcomm.

Apple product is not that low-level, and given its dependence on the iPhone... it'd better find solutions.

Re:No Qual Comm would mean no CDMA.

[Solandri]

Cdma is being phased out anyway for LTE. It just means that Verizon will accelerate plans to phase out and shut down the cdma towers iin favor of the faster 4g LTE ones. (Which they are doing anyways)

Voice on CDMA networks still operates over CDMA. Just like voice on GSM still operates over TDMA (which GSM had to abandon for wideband CDMA for 3G data - that's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. Your GSM phone is jam packed with CDMA technology. That's why you could talk and use data at the same time on GSM handsets - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for 3G data. CDMA phones used a single radio for both, so couldn't do both at the same time.)

This would be a moot point if everyone switched to VoLTE (voice over LTE). But the carriers have been reluctant to completely switch since their 2G and 3G networks still have better coverage than their LTE networks. It also makes their towers compatible with all devices allowing phone owners to use their handset with any carrier, which would increase competition and lower prices. And you can't be having that.

Qualcomm is so far in the wrong here it isn't even funny. They are trying to charge Apple two to three times for the same patent just because Apple has deep pockets. If no one else has to pay twice for the same patent. Not HTC not Nexus and Google.

I agree completely. (They're not charging 2-3x per se, they're trying to get Apple to re-pay to license patents that the supplier Apple bought the Qualcomm chips from has already paid to license. i.e. Qualcomm believes if a patent licensee sells a product using the patent, the buyer also needs to license the patent too. Kind of a value-added tax approach to patent licensing. If they succeed in court against Apple, the Android handset manufacturers are next.)

But there's a good deal of karmaic justice here. Apple was the one who tried to argue in court that patent damage awards should be based on the entire price of the infringing product, rather than the value of the component which infringed. e.g. If a car offered GPS navigation as a factory option, and a GPS patent holder successfully sued for infringement, they should be awarded damages based on the value of the entire car, rather than the value of the GPS navigation unit.

Re:No Qual Comm would mean no CDMA.

[mysidia]

Why is that exactly?

Qualcomm's abuse in essence is double/triple-dipping. Licensing technology based on their patent ONCE, that Apple pays the manufacturer for a component that Qualcomm received royalties for its manufacture, then demanding patent royalties directly from Apple for using the Qualcomm chip.

Things are probably a little bit more complex than that, but in essence, attempting to double-dip is wrong because patent rights are "Exhausted" in each unit of product that you sell pursuant to the patent rights.

E.G. Suppose you invent a new type of fencing material, you patent it, and you start selling it.
If one of your customers resells some of the material they purchased from you to a neighbor, then you don't have a right to go to your customer and collect patent royalties.

So it is with computer chips. Suppose I manufacture a video camera, and I want to use MP4-AVC encoding, so I buy H.264 encoder chip, and I use the chip to create a recording of captured content ---- H.264 is patented, so the manufacture of the chip had to pay royalties to license the patent.

Since I did all my encoding with the chip that was licensed from the patentholder': the patent holders' for H.264 have no patent right to charge me royalties again off of the same patent to record encoded content from the chip to a storage medium ---- their patent rights in my product were exhausted, because I already paid for a product that was sold to me in compliance with their patent rights.

Now it's true the end-user of my product could have to pay them royalties again, because they need to buy software or hardware to decode and/or
re-encode my content to suit their needs, and the encoder or de-coder will have to use a licensed chip or be itself-licensed.

Apple probably uses a camera module in their iPhone. In this hypothetical situation.... double/triple-dipping what Qualcomm is said to be doing would be like a patentholder going after OEMs of the Camera module I manufacture that incorporates their licensed H.264 chips demanding patent royalties, and also demanding patent royalties from ME, because I used one of their H.264 chips as a component of my design.

Now consider how critical quality video compressed encoding formats are in this world....
the kinds of protocols Qualcomm chips implement are just as if not more important for Cellular communications to work,
and the alternatives to the chips Qualcomm licenses are greatly inferior in terms of reliability, speed/performance, and power efficiency.

So Apple just switching out the Qualcomm parts could potentially in the short term mess up the user experience and cause all sorts of usability issues --- no small matter to completely switch to a different chipmaker's designs.

Re:Qualcomm deserve to die

[Just Some Guy]

processor from ARM (under license)

From Wikipedia:

Companies can also obtain an ARM architectural licence for designing their own CPU cores using the ARM instruction sets. These cores must comply fully with the ARM architecture. Companies that have designed cores that implement an ARM architecture include Apple, AppliedMicro, Broadcom, Cavium, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Samsung Electronics.

Yours is an incredibly (and wrongly) narrow interpretation of the Apple/ARM relationship. Apple licenses the right to design their own CPUs, and then actually design them.