From what I'm reading this is a win for Apple and a life line for Qualcomm:
This observation from Arstechnica sums it up:
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Apple and Qualcomm Reach Settlement, Agree to Drop All Litigation
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From what I'm reading this is a win for Apple and a life line for Qualcomm:
This observation from Arstechnica sums it up:
Had predicted this outcome. Glad Qualcomm stood their ground to a traitorous company to Western intellectual properties that wants to bully their way to a free handout.
For those that were rooting for Apple+Huawei+China be thankful engineering jobs stay in the West and your future generations won't be flipping burgers because you were wishing for engineering and R&D to go away elsewhere.
For those that were rooting for Apple+Huawei+China be thankful engineering jobs stay in the West and your future generations won't be flipping burgers because you were wishing for engineering and R&D to go away elsewhere.
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A win-win-win... 1 for Apple, 1 for Qualcomm and 1 for consumers.
Wait until end of May for Computex in Taipei. AMD is due to have a paper launch of Zen2 and start shipments 2-3 weeks after. Supposedly they're going to ram Intel down with ST performance with this revision.
The real loser is Cook with his attempt to teach Qualcomm a lesson in supply chain reality. He's been using market power these past years to squeeze companies and string them along and Qualcomm must have been an eyesore. I doubt he blinked and it was the apple board who wanted to move on. Apple would have lost the lawsuit, Intel won't have a 5G modem soon, and there's also Apple's own imaginary 5G modem containing no Qualcomm IP.
Every time I've been called to jury duty for civil court, and we've been called to a courtroom, the case gets settled as soon as we show up.
It's like, the sight of a jury and seeing that "this is really happening" gets people to work out their differences.
Nice to see this happens even with the big boys.
It's like, the sight of a jury and seeing that "this is really happening" gets people to work out their differences.
Nice to see this happens even with the big boys.
Guessing here but the gentle point was that a patent lawyer shouldn't have got this wrong.
This is laughable. Apple had to pay what they agreed to. There was no extortion here other than Apple with their same old crap. Apple paid up and blinked and added $2 a share to Qualcomm's earning. That is pure settlement money and it was big.
That’s the point. You can’t condition sales of chips on taking a license, because when you sell the chip there’s nothing to license.
No, that’s not settlement money. That’s chip sales resuming, plus getting paid for past withheld monies.
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They always knew they had to pay. The point of the lawsuits was the amount was in dispute (and, of course, they should NOT need to pay license fees when they buy Qualcomm chips, only when they use Intel or their own).
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No, no. I’m clearly wrong. I’ve been schooled by the argument h “exhaustion applies when you buy chips from intel.” I forgot that the law only applies to companies with 5-letter names.
Nice to hear, wish the qualcomm radios were in last year's ipad pro................although I have no current issues. And we all knew Apple would never won't 5G from Huawei...Qualcomm was their only true 5G option if you think about it.
Qualcomm of course has lots of other customers. But Apple once accounted for, and now will again account for, a huge portion of Qualcomm's income. Qualcomm estimates about 2-1/2 billion dollars in incremental annual income ("as product shipments ramp") as a result of this settlement.
That's a lot of money for a company that made $5.3 billion and $5.7 billion in FY 2015 and FY 2016, when it still had Apple as a major customer. Qualcomm only made $2.5 billion in FY 2017 after it lost Apple as a major customer, and it lost $4.9 billion in FY 2018. The numbers for those last 2 years are pretty misleading as there were some major one time items which were accounted for - e.g., fines imposed by regulatory bodies and costs associated with the failed NXP deal. But, still, Apple represented a big chunk of its business which for a time was lost. It desperately needed to make up with Apple, and sooner rather than later. It had spent huge amounts of money buying back its stock, yet its share price was still greatly depressed before news of today's settlement hit.
On the legal front, Qualcomm had mostly been losing the important decisions. Yes, it won a few minor - essentially inconsequential, other than when it came to optics - decisions. But on the important issues it lost over and over. Even without a possible loss in the Apple v Qualcomm case for which a jury was selected yesterday, its business model had been greatly disrupted. Its ability to conduct business as it had previously has been significantly eroded.
Doable but probably won't because that would take investment not only initially but ongoing with every new version and also assuming the risk and management overhead that industry leading companies TSMC, Foxconn, Japan Display, and Intel are assuming now. All the billions spent on propping up the stock price with buybacks and the $250+ billion in cash doing nothing but earning interest says Apple would rather not get serious about it.
Intel bowing out of the 5G smartphone market further validates Apple is the one that capitulated to Qualcomm and not the other way around. Of course Apple apologist and zealots will spin it.
Wrong. Intel has no need to continue now because they just lost any hope of selling enough quantity to ever be able to turn a profit on it. Why throw even more money down the drain? It would just be good money after bad. Apple may be on the hook for some or all of Intel’s 5G development costs—who knows what their agreement with Intel is—but surely Apple notified Intel that they would not be buying their baseband chips in 2021 or beyond.
It’s obviously important to you to spin this settlement as an Apple loss, but why? In any case, nothing you’ve said so far supports that notion.
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Obviously, Intel did not make a decision after today's announcement. That would be just too fast. Decisions of such magnitude are not made that quickly. It's possible that Apple notified Intel in advance that they were settling with Qualcomm. It's also possible that Intel made this decision first and then notified Apple.
Absolutely. Apple wouldn’t have told Intel about any potential settlement, but probably did they’ll them that by 2021 they intend to make their own chips. Either way, things were bleak for Intel.
Does raise new antitrust issues for Qualcomm, though.