Apple Again Said to Adopt Intel LTE Chips for iPhones in 2016

[MacRumors]

Some of Apple's iPhones produced in 2016 will use wireless modem chips supplied by Intel rather than Qualcomm, reports VentureBeat. iPhones (presumably the iPhone 7) sold in emerging markets in Asia and Latin America will reportedly use an Intel 7360 LTE modem.

Intel has been gunning hard during the past year for a place in the iPhone and now appears to have succeeded, at least partly. The 7360 chip will ship inside a special version of the iPhone that will be marketed to emerging markets in Asia and Latin America, the sources said.

The 7360 LTE modem chip [PDF] from Intel features up to 450Mbps downlink and it supports 29 LTE bands. It will begin shipping out to manufacturers during the second half of 2015. Apple engineers have reportedly been traveling to Munich, Germany to collaborate with Intel engineers on the chip.

Though VentureBeat suggests the Intel chips might only be used in some iPhones in emerging markets, analyst Ben Bajarin believes that Apple would make the switch universal, rather than using separate chips in different versions of the phone.

Today's report is the second time we've heard inklings of an Intel-Apple modem partnership. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted Apple's switch from Qualcomm to Intel for its baseband chips back in January. The shift from Qualcomm to Intel for even a portion of LTE chips will be a major loss for Qualcomm, as the company has supplied Apple with modem chips for many years now.

Article Link: Apple Again Said to Adopt Intel LTE Chips for iPhones in 2016

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

They should adopt Intel LTE chips for the Skylake MBA!

 

[MacFather]

Deleted.

 

[BeSweeet]

Does anybody know which bands it supports? I'd be shocked if it's missing band 12 (though everyone was shocked that even the 6/6+ was lacking it).

 

[2457282]

i dont understand the difference between the qualcom and intel chip. is this just a price thing or is one significantly different than the other?

 

[ilfn143]

not a bright future for qualcomm. first samsung stop using snapdragon now apple not going to use their modem.

 

[janderson0719]

I'm thinking we'll finally see smaller top and bottom bezels with the iPhone 7.

 

[macduke]

450Mbps LTE? That's the peak speed of 802.11n on my old Airport Extreme, lol.

Blow through your entire wireless plan in one minute!

 

[dannyyankou]

450Mbps LTE? That's the peak speed of 802.11n on my old Airport Extreme, lol.

Blow through your entire wireless plan in one minute!

That wouldn't happen unless you plan on downloading an HD movie over cellular. If you're just doing normal day to day things over cellular, speed won't have a big effect on how much data you use.

 

[justperry]

That wouldn't happen unless you plan on downloading an HD movie over cellular. If you're just doing normal day to day things over cellular, speed won't have a big effect on how much data you use.

True, but just taping on a youtube link by mistake a few times in a month will already do some damage to your data plan.
A user should be able to set the maximum download rate for movies, or set the maximum cache.

 

[CoMoMacUser]

That wouldn't happen unless you plan on downloading an HD movie over cellular. If you're just doing normal day to day things over cellular, speed won't have a big effect on how much data you use.

Yup. Plus, no cell site will have the backhaul necessary to provide a single user with 450 Mbps, let alone multiple ones simultaneously. It's like buying a car that can do 180 mph and living in a place where traffic means you're lucky to get above 70.

 

[stu.h]

Is the jailbreak out for Apple Watch and iOS 9 yet?

 

[kwikdeth]

gotta go with Ben Bajarin, Apple hates having multiple hardware versions of the same product. they'll go for simplicity as much as possible. i see two versions, tops.

 

[macduke]

Is the jailbreak out for Apple Watch and iOS 9 yet?

Oh gosh, I wouldn't even think about jailbreaking an Apple Watch unless you want to recharge your watch during the day, lol. Would be kind of cool to hack it into a little mini-computer that you could use for different tasks, however.

 

[MentalFloss]

i dont understand the difference between the qualcom and intel chip. is this just a price thing or is one significantly different than the other?

From user perspective, that is probably it, yes. There will also be certain feature differences, but the majority of end users wouldn't even notice them.

You can compare it to the Intel / AMD rivalry in PC CPUs, except this time around, Intel is the underdog. Qualcomm is an unbelievably powerful company in the mobile business. Probably more powerful than Intel has ever been in the CPU business.

 

[kemal]

Maybe the BB chip comes with 16GB free intel NAND?

 

[MentalFloss]

450Mbps LTE? That's the peak speed of 802.11n on my old Airport Extreme, lol.

Blow through your entire wireless plan in one minute!

You mean in that minute you would download half a GB of... what exactly?

For me, LTE has made my websurfing experience significantly faster. That doesn't imply that I surf faster in terms of visiting more websites per minute (and end up with a higher download volume).

 

[Saucesome2000]

That wouldn't happen unless you plan on downloading an HD movie over cellular. If you're just doing normal day to day things over cellular, speed won't have a big effect on how much data you use.

Actually it does. Look at the reports of Verizon users data use skyrocketing once Verizon got LTE in the iPhone 5. Sites can detect what kind of connection you have and automatically load higher quality content.

 

[mschmalenbach]

I guess it's only a loss for Qualcomm if the business they lose was sufficiently profitable.

Don't presume that being a supplier to Apple is a guarantee of huge financial success. Or, for that matter, being a supplier to any of the very biggest users of semiconductors. I'm sure they drive a hard bargain, and just being big is no guarantee of financial success. Broadcom pulled out of significant SoC business last year, the former Atmel fab in France was sold to its employees for just 1 Euro, and has now been shut (it couldn't be made to work even when it was effectively free!), and TI shut down it's OMAP ARM business because nobody would buy it and it represented 13% of its costs with just 5% of the revenue...

 

[manu chao]

They should adopt Intel LTE chips for the Skylake MBA!

iOS and a lot of its app have been designed to (optionally) restrict part of its networking to WiFi. It's something every app designer with potentially a lot of data traffic has to consider, adding a mode where some networking duties are put on hold if there is no WiFi connection and deciding which part of the data traffic falls into which category.

All this does not exist in OS X or in applications running on it. Meaning there is no way to limit what data can travel over a cellphone network modem. Every networking call would have to be evaluated by the OS X developers (and third-party developers) to decide into which category it would fall, ie, category (1) for traffic that only should flow if there is a Wifi or Ethernet connection and category (2) for traffic that should also flow if there is only a connection via a cellphone network connection.

And it is not only about deciding into which bucket a certain type of traffic should fall, it is to ensure that other parts of the OS can cope with only part of their network requests going through. OS X is simply not designed with the idea that network traffic might be metered and billed. So, it's not only creating such a two tier data traffic system, it is also about minimising the amount of traffic that is deemed to flow over the cellphone network, again something the is OS is not designed for.

That is in my opinion the main reason be don't have laptops with cellphone network modems (to my knowledge they are also far and few between on the Windows side).

----------

True, but just taping on a youtube link by mistake a few times in a month will already do some damage to your data plan.
A user should be able to set the maximum download rate for movies, or set the maximum cache.

You can switch off 4G all together, thought that might be a bit of crude way.

 

[ttss6]

So rumors about a rumored phone with features that no one but Apple execs know will not be included in this years rumored phone?

 

[twilo]

That is in my opinion the main reason be don't have laptops with cellphone network modems (to my knowledge they are also far and few between on the Windows side).

Windows 8 and up has pretty good network management for mobile networks.. you can set it as "metered" if its limited.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/metered-internet-connections-frequently-asked-questions

 

[commander.data]

The iPhone 1-4 used Infineon wireless modems and Intel bought Infineon's wireless portfolio, so Apple would just be returning to their original supplier. If I remember correctly, in the Apple-Samsung patent lawsuits, Samsung accused Apple of violating their wireless patents on Infineon-based iPhones but not Qualcomm-based iPhones. Hopefully, Apple's new contract with Intel provides better patent exhaustion protection to avoid that being used against them.

 

[Tech198]

That would make it confusing if Apple DID make different put chips in other regions.

Although would be fun to watch while iFix it scrambles to see which chip for which country(s).

 

[Andrei90]

Oh gosh, I wouldn't even think about jailbreaking an Apple Watch unless you want to recharge your watch during the day, lol. Would be kind of cool to hack it into a little mini-computer that you could use for different tasks, however.

I forgot about jailbreak! Maybe the jealbreak community can free the Apple Watch from needing an iPhone to work, that'd be amazing.