Apple Considered Purchasing Intel's Smartphone Modem Chip Business

Apple reportedly considered acquiring parts of Intel's smartphone modem chip business as they looked into ways to speed up their own efforts to build modem chips for smartphones. MacRumors reports: Intel and Apple entered into discussions last summer and the talks continued for months, but ended right around the time Apple settled its legal dispute and reached a supply agreement with Qualcomm. Sources at Intel that spoke to The Wall Street Journal said that Intel is exploring "strategic alternatives" for its smartphone modem chip business, and is still interested in a sale to Apple or another company.

In an interview yesterday, Intel CEO Bob Swan confirmed that Intel is considering alternatives "based on what's best" for Intel's IP and employees: "Selling the modem business would allow Intel to unload a costly operation that was losing about $1 billion annually, according to another person familiar with its performance. Any sale would likely include staff, a portfolio of patents and modem designs related to multiple generations of wireless technology, said Patrick Moorhead, principal at Moor Insights & Strategy, a technology firm."

MacWhoosh

[rmdingler]

Apple's intel suggests innovation is overrated: buying up markets you're interested in makes dollars and sense.

Intel is Dead

[sexconker]

Mark my words. Intel is circling that drain.

Why bother, get the people instead

[alvinrod]

They know what Intel's chips were capable of and it wasn't all that much, so I'm not sure why they'd want the technology, particularly if they've already started building their own. Unless the business gets sold to someone else soon, the engineers that worked there are going to be looking for new jobs and Apple can pick the most talented and the ones that know what when wrong with Intel's efforts so that Apple can avoid those same pitfalls.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

it wasn't all that much, so I'm not sure why they'd want the technology

Intel acquired the modem business from Infineon, which was a well known supplier of modem chipsets to Apple.

In fact, their claim to fame was extremely low power operation - enough so that even AT&T begged Apple to not use the chipset. What happens is extremely aggressive set up and tear down of data channels - basically it would add data channels when you request data, then shut them down the instant the transfer completes. This caus

Re:

[Kjella]

Of course, the problem is Intel really didn't do much with their purchase - Infineon was one of the top competitors to Qualcomm.

Well, Intel bought that business in 2011 and in 2012 they launched their Medfield [anandtech.com] platform so the plan was presumably to use it for their in-house smartphones. Sub-licensing modules to other manufacturers wasn't part of their business model at the time, so when that flopped they had no market. So I think the plan and timing was okay, but the star failed to carry the show so it was all for naught. These kinds of things happen in business, you did a great job on your part but the product/service as a whole fl

Re:

[Bearhouse]

Very good post; mostly agree. One thing - IBM tried to fight the PC clones but could not, since they had - for the first time in their history - not "locked down" all the technology. Once the bios was reverse-engineered the game was up. Intel would sell chips to anyone, and Microsoft DOS then Windows too...
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open source the IP

[mtaht]

The smartest thing that intel could do, would be to release all the IP and software as open source, rather than letting it die - for the rest of the world to build upon and improve. This would - for example - suddenly make the trust issues everyone is having about 5G from other makers, vanish - as soon as someone figured it out enough to build on and improve.