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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.
There's quite a bit of legacy hardware out there in the form of home alarm systems, car emergency systems (On Star, for example), that uses Qualcomm's CDMA. (That said, I have to admit to a lack of sympathy here, given that that technology was more or less a proprietary standard, and the manufacturers and various other companies that decided to build it into their devices should have known they were investing in something with a shelf life. But, hey, the people most affected by the shut down are the people who never made the decision to pick that particular technology.)
Getting rid of 2G GSM is insane, it's the most reliable and ubiquitous voice cellular system in the world and it only needs about 600kHz to provide a bare bones service. AT&T shouldn't have dropped it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It is slightly newsworthy in that it hasn't been feasible to make phones without Qualcomm chips until recently. For smaller companies, it would take a lot of work not to use Qualcomm chips/tech that most companies end up paying Qualcomm's royalty fees as there was little they could do. With Intel trying to make modems and Apple willing to invest the necessary R&D to do so, it means trouble for Qualcomm. Because if Apple is successful, other companies like Samsung can use the same technology as Apple.
I don't know who is right in the Qualcomm/Apple dispute but when a lot of money is at stake, companies will seek alternatives. At the heart of the dispute is $1B that Apple claims Qualcomm owes them for rebates. Apple says Qualcomm stopped delivering quarterly rebates in retaliation of Apple cooperating with the South Korean investigation.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's not like they design their own CPUs or anything. That'd be crazytalk!
So Apple designs almost every component in an iPhone except for the radio. Qualcomm thinks they're entitled to a percent of the whole device price because... well, I don't know. Because they're special or something. Is their magic radio really more valuable to an iPhone than to a cheap Android? Of course not. But they continue to want to charge Apple several times more for the exact same price just because they (think they) can. I can't imagine a plausible scenario in which Apple wouldn't design Qualcomm out of their supply line. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if they turned around and offered to license their non-Qualcomm radio at cost to anyone else who wants to use it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Either that 10% is the most important 10%, or it's not just 10%. Apple's chips murder every other chip on the market. It's not really even close.
No matter how you slice it, Apple's chip design is second-to-none, and trying to wave your hands in an attempt to diminish Apple's engineering prowess really isn't working.