Wow, they hired a ton of people and acquired Intel’s modem business in the hopes of having their own modem. That’s an expensive experiment
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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More like a sabotage attempt by Intel
Wut?
There's a reason Intel exited in the first place. Had they been successful, it would've been a business worth tens of billions of dollars. They exited and Apple wanted to try because the money to buy the business for Apple is chump change.
They could even acquire TSMC if push came to shove. Their large cash holdings gives Apple so much strategic leverage.
Uhhhh no, Apple would not be able to acquire TSMC
They could even acquire TSMC if push came to shove. Their large cash holdings gives Apple so much strategic leverage.
You realize that TSMC is way bigger than Apple, right? Apple's entire current cash reserves would be enough to buy 1% of the company.
You realize that TSMC is way bigger than Apple, right?
By market cap, Apple is significantly larger than TSMC
At current market caps TSMC is just over 1/6th the size of Apple
Non issue though because that would never make it past antitrust
Yeah no the Taiwanese government would never allow it.
It's totally pathetic that even after buying an entire other modem company they couldn't even do what Huawei was able to do under sanctions by the entire western world. Huawai's 5G modem, built on an inferior 7nm process, has been tested to outperform Qualcomm's. Why are apple engineers so incompetent?
Damn. How hard is to create a 5G modem that both Intel and Apple could not make it work?
It's very hard analog design
It has a lot more to do with the modern patent system becoming weponized
But Apple has a cross licensing agreement with Qualcomm
Everything I have heard about it is that it is insanely complicated. You have to deal with different radio frequencies and communicating with the right one properly and reliably. I think that Apple thought that since they did an excellent job designing their own chips, that modems would be a cinch but this has proven to not be the case at all.
It's not that they can't make a 5G modem, they can, it's just that it won't be as good as the Qualcomm modems Apple is already licensing. Qualcomm is the gold standard for modems, and when manufacturers use someone else, like Google's Pixel using Samsung's modems, you get tons of complaints about lower battery life/abnormal heat, and poor reception.
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The main issue is carrier relationships. Not patents.
The modem is not the hard part, not easy either. But having enough engagement with carriers worldwide to support all the use cases in terms of infrastructure combinations. The validation process for that is extremely expensive. That is one of the value propositions Qualcomm offers to the customers of their chipsets; they basically take care of all that headache for the phone vendor/integrator if they just go with their chipset (android) or modem (apple).
This is why the most successful modem companies (Qualcomm Huawei) either also offer a lot of infrastructure products themselves or have very strong connections with infrastructure manufacturers like Ericsson and Nokia (Samsung, Mediatek).
From the HW perspective, the issue is not the modem itself, but all the supporting chipset specially the antena/RF elements. Which in 5G involve a lot of beam "herding" whose power is hard to scale and are not that easy to manufacture. Also there are lots of thermal issues with those antenna elements.
Apple does not have, currently, the corporate culture for that type of engagement. Because they got a very good technical team from intel, but not the other side of the equation in terms of telco carrier infra engagement.
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Qualcomm has spent billions in R&D and development of 5G. They bought patients here and there but most have been developed in house. It isn't easy, or cheap.
Patients? Someone got sick/injured?
Animal friendly testing.
So they used humans. Smart move I say
Mediatek, Samsung, and Huawei also have their own modems.
Samsung has 1 5G modem that they keep re-releasing
Pretty hard thing to do. Intel failed to make one that works correctly.
I assume that Apple will continue buying modems from Qualcomm or is there another vendor (excluding Huawei)?
They also buy modems from Samsung, depending on the region
Since when? I've never read that anywhere
I wonder if Apple would ever give an official statement that this has happened.
There are 4 companies in the world that make 5G modems:
Qualcomm.
Samsung.
Mediatek.
Huawei.
Don’t forget Broadcom. Apple actually just signed a deal with them to be the sole provider of modems for their phones. I recently started working for them.
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- Unisoc, GCT, Sequans, ASR Micro, Sony Semiconductor.
- Huawei
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Wonder what Google is doing for the Pixel 10.
Qualcomm, Samsung and Mediatek are there only options.
Mediatek is not a real option for the US. I've never seen even one mediatek flagship get sold in the US they're all budget models
Almost like it's insanely hard to make cellular modems or something...
I have no idea, but I suspect the hard thing about making a modern modem is not so much making it, but making it without infringing on a bunch of patents and copyrights.
so many people saying "its hard to make a modem" but nobody has anything to say about why its hard
8 years ago looking at the state of AMD, Intel, IBM, and every other CPU fab would lead some people to say "well yeah making a processor is extremely hard", yet these days amazon and google literally make their own and there are tons of riscv startups. not saying making a modem is easy but sometimes there are other roadblocks in technology, like bad management wasting money
there are other roadblocks in technology,
Like not getting your ass sued off for violating some patent that some troll somewhere owns.
Wht y there are so many of patents related to modems, but not on other things like cpu, gpu or idk what
Apparently not a problem for Qualcomm, Mediatek, Samsung, or Huawei. And Apple certainly doesn't shy away from litigation.
It's not that Apple can't do it, it's that they don't think it's going to be worth the expense to them.
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yet these days amazon and google literally make their own
Aren't these ARM processors? Didn't ARM do most of the engineering?
No, ARM makes the specification and the chip manufacturers implement them
Arm also has their own off the shelf chip designs, and most of the time, companies license the chip designs. I don’t think there are that many that have architectural licenses to use the ISA and implement it themselves/design everything in house.
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Apple, secretly working on their own standards for iWi-Fi for ten x data rates.
If true this is really bad news.
So no 5g MacBooks then?
This rumor seems sort of dubious. I would wait for a second source to confirm, the dude who leaked mostly gets info from supply chains and his info isn’t always correct (predicted the 1tb iPhone Pro would be replaced with a 2tb iPhone Pro). It’s possible he heard something like they’re no longer planning for it before 2028 and after the game of telephone it turned into they’re no longer planning for it, period.
Yes a bit premature to believe this based off a blogger from Korea. Apple is not so quick to drop the billions they have spent on it already
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That's truly unfortunate that this modem quagmire on iPhone will continue to persist, even after Apple gobbled up what started it in Intel's modem unit.
goes to show you how insanely strong Huawei is I hope they come back , I miss their phones but without google services I can't buy one
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