Apple Starts Work on Its Own Cellular Modem, Chip Chief Says (bloomberg.com) 51
Apple has started building its own cellular modem for future devices, a move that would replace components from Qualcomm, Apple's top chip executive told staff on Thursday. From a report: Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, made the disclosure in a town hall meeting with Apple employees, according to people familiar with the comments. "This year, we kicked off the development of our first internal cellular modem which will enable another key strategic transition," he said. "Long-term strategic investments like these are a critical part of enabling our products and making sure we have a rich pipeline of innovative technologies for our future." A cellular modem is one of the most important parts of a smartphone, enabling phone calls and connection to the internet via cellular networks. Srouji said the $1 billion acquisition of Intel's modem business in 2019 helped Apple build a team of hardware and software engineers to develop its own cellular modem.
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Boot Camp too prevent monopoly charge (Score:2)
"This year, we kicked off the development of our first full monopoly" /fixed
Add Boot Camp for ARM Windows and/or ARM Linux and the "monopoly" charge fails. As if PCs running Windows and Linux, and Chromebooks, were not enough.
Vertical monopoly (Score:2)
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Currently, the Apple modem chip has 0% of the market.
So it may be a bit premature to call it a monopoly.
Re: Vertical monopoly (Score:1)
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US v Paramount ruling fails with Boot Camp (Score:2)
Parent was talking about the modem chip, not the OS.
Not really, the article which I did not respond to talked about the chip. The parent I responded to talked about a monopoly.
... 'vertical integration', but it is a form of monopoly ...
True but it is doubtful that is what the GP is referring to, far more likely they are referring to monopolistic anticompetitive action.
... and has been the target of antitrust action in the past. [wikipedia.org]
Which proves my point. Paramount got into trouble only allowing its theaters to show its movies, which would be akin to allowing macs to only run macOS. Hence Boot Camp installing Windows or Linux directly on the hardware makes the Paramount case inap
Re: US v Paramount ruling fails with Boot Camp (Score:2)
Paramount got into trouble only allowing its theaters to show its movies, which would be akin to allowing macs to only run macOS.
Which would be akin to allowing iPhones to run only iOS.
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Paramount got into trouble only allowing its theaters to show its movies, which would be akin to allowing macs to only run macOS.
Which would be akin to allowing iPhones to run only iOS.
Could be. However US v Paramount may fail for other reasons. For example a geographical area is only served by one theatre, so access to non-Paramount movies was effectively denied to a region. That is not the case with smartphones where underlying service is not region locked to iOS or Android.
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Intel and Qualcomm sell their modem chips to whoever wants them for use in whatever product they like.
Is that right? And I assume they sell them for totally fair and equitable prices to all comers?
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LOL yes because for sure apple is know for being " fair and equitable"
The topic was Qualcomm, my dude, and why Apple might not want to do business with them. There's no evidence Apple plans to sell its modems to anyone else.
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That's how capitalism works right?
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Eh, I'm not even mad. Remember, the alternative is using Qualcomm chips.
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That's right. They have a COMPLETE MONOPOLY over their own product which has a 39% market share in the US.
Uh.. that's not what a monopoly means (Score:3)
monopoly means you are the only practical seller in a market and thus can dictate terms to buyers. Apple can make all of it's cell phones from organically farmed minerals sustainable harvested from it's own private star, and it would not be a monopoly.
What is going on however is that apple has reached a size where the cost of R&D is small compared to revenues. So they can afford to stand up a design (maybe not a foundry) operation for just their own consumption.
What are the remaining major components?
Re: Uh.. that's not what a monopoly means (Score:2)
Thank you! Somebody finally said it.
Too many people confusing complete control over their product and monopolistic behavior. Nothing says a manufacturer must buy 3rd party components for use in their own.
Intel Was Elop'ed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Intel Was Elop'ed (Score:5, Informative)
> whether Apple's negative judgment and rejection of Intel's modem chip was genuine, or contrived
It was genuine. Qualcomm smacked them with a ridiculous patent that IIRC came down to pipelining "ON A CELLULAR MODEM" - totally obvious to anybody who's been paying attention since the 80's.
So Intel's modem had to wait for an ack before sending more data or something like that and the performance was just terrible.
My memory is fuzzy on the implementation details but regardless Apple knows about this so they must intend to challenge the patent or hit Qualcomm so hard with other patents that their usorous heads will spin.
Don't make me cheer for Apple but Qualcomm is just the worst.
MAybe apple got thw qualcom patent in a settlement (Score:2)
Apple did settle with qualcom. Maybe part of the settlement was that they were allowed to use some of Qualcoms patent portfolio.
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Then the crux would be whether Apple's negative judgment and rejection of Intel's modem chip was genuine, or contrived to cause the failure of that business.
Let’s put it this way, not long after Apple ditched Qualcomm, they also killed the field test mode where you could actually see the received signal strength in dBm and cut off any developer access to it as well. The problem was the intel chips suck and phones would perform around 3dBm worse than Qualcomm ones, with some outliers even being 5+. Thus you could show beyond a doubt the newer phones were worse than the old ones so it was quickly axed.
Well intel couldn't find any market (Score:3)
Since Intel couldn't find anyone at all to buy their modems, it seems reasonable to conclude apple's rejection was on the merits too.
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Apple actually crippled the Qualcomm modems to make them as slow as the Intel ones, so that they could fit both to iPhones and people wouldn't complain that they got the slow model. Of course there were power consumption differences too, which they denied.
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Apple wasn't offering a pity f**k to Intel, they were offering a "f**k you" to Qualcomm after they traded blows in court. Apple has a habit of cutting off its nose to spite its face: deploying Apple Maps before it was ready just to spite Google for releasing a competing smartphone OS, refusing to sign NVidia drivers for new versions of macOS, etc.
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The M1 is used ATM in MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, and later probably in Desktop Macs: which have no walled harden and never will have one
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Re: Intel Was Elop'ed (Score:2)
âoeIntel needs no help running something into the ground.â
- Will.i.am straddling the Intel OCC bike
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Apple's patent fight with Qualcomm was about breaking Qualcomm's monopolistic licensing practices. It's not correct to say that Intel couldn't find buyers for their modems; their modems didn't work. They would delay the release of Apple's 5G iPhones at least a year behind any Android ones particularly Samsung to get the tech right, and they couldn't have that. Intel wasn't going to acquire any other significant customers for
Re: Intel Was Elop'ed (Score:2)
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Also, Nokia (in the US) was patent-trolled...hard... by Qualcomm as well. In the late 1990s, and the first half-decade or so of the 2000s, Nokia phones were nearly ubiquitous here. They were especially popular among the younger demographics with the interchangeable faceplates... the first examples of "phone as fashion" were NOT the iPhone. And Nokia weren't exactly resting on their laurels either. But as the US finally got onboard with the GSM standards; Qualcomm and their lawyers took note and slithere
"It's the best modem we have ever made!" (Score:2)
More powerful, less power (Score:3)
If Apple is as good as they seem to be, their modem chip will be three times as fast as the Qualcomm one and use an order of magnitude less power.
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Re: More powerful, less power (Score:2, Funny)
Integration and 5G? (Score:2)
Apple will figure out how to integrate the redundant parts of the modem into their main CPU bus. Since 5G means the data will be a rush like a mainline injection of heroin not a puff on a bong, 5G is going to get bottlnecked exiting the radio.
SO what's going to happen is Qualcom is going to start integrating CPUs into their Radios for the same reason. And thus Qualcom wins the whole match, and apple has to forget the M1 arms and go with whatever qualcom cpu does. ... or they integrate the radio into their
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SO what's going to happen is Qualcom is going to start integrating CPUs into their Radios for the same reason.
My guess is Apple can get a good modem in the CPU before Qualcomm can get a good CPU into the modem...
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Highly unlikely. And Apple isn't that good, they haven't produced any magical orders of magnitude improvements. Maybe an order of magnitude more hype.
The power consumption of models is down to two things. There is the DSP and software stack, but the bulk is the RF side. And the RF side can only really be optimized by having better antennas or more efficient electronics at the silicon level. Antennas are high end physics and already close to the known limits of science, and efficient electronics are really d
Of course! (Score:2)
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You wants the short (Score:1)
Not very secretive for a super secretive company (Score:1)