Apple Building Chip Team to Bring More Wireless Component Production In-House

[goobot]

Apple has a new multi-million dollar campus that's not being fully utilized due to staff working from home, and they need to add yet another office? Seems puzzling to my. Why is close proximity to other chip makers important?

To steal their talent

 

[svish]

Apple is going all in with their chips. This will lead to better battery and overall performance.

 

[huge_apple_fangirl]

Great that Apple’s going all-in on custom chips for everything. Now the question is: When will Apple create a chip to replace the Intel thunderbolt controller- so it will truly be “Intel outside”? ?

 

[827538]

Qualcomm's "lead" in this instance is largely based on the fact that most of the 5G carrier side gear, is also their own. Not saying they don't come up with some new stuff on their own that is better than everyone else's, but their market position and performance is largely because they're on both sides of the equation. LTE vs WiMAX is a time where they went the wrong direction at first, and it showed others could do some really nice LTE modems as well. With 5G, between all the anti-China stuff and other politicking, they're trying really hard to make sure all the carriers are only running their gear, so that their modems are a lot easier to make "perform better than others."

Again, that's not saying their chips aren't the best for use right now, or anything of the like. Just that I think the context matters of why they're the "best."

Qualcomm makes no cellular infrastructure components as far as I'm aware? I know they were a member who contributed to the standard but that's all. Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia are the biggest players, Qualcomm is at the consumer end.

 

[carestudio]

was wondering if apple is going to hire engineers from Broadcom and Skyworks?

 

[bn-7bc]

Should be interesting to see who sues Apple for patent infringement once these chips are used in their devices.

Well if apple is diligent with there patent licensing and violates no existing supply agreements that should be no one, unless I@m missing something IANAL

 

[bn-7bc]

be

Why not manufacture chips while at it? There wouldn’t be chip shortages if we stop depending on Asia. Apple has so much money they can build these factories in no time. They only worry about bottom line so they don’t have to buy from others.

caue developing chip fab tech at the level of the latest TSMC stuff (which apple uses. is a long risky and costly prosess that has to be amortize over a lot more chips than apple has volumes for, but nothing is impossible

 

[killhippie]

Third party fixes for Apple gear is going to get very hard to do if its all proprietary parts, so the right to have it fixed elsewhere is going to fail I would think as they wont have the apple parts to do it, also having everything in house leads surely to putting all your eggs in one basket which is never a good idea in the tech world, its why companies use parts from many manufacturers in case a something goes wrong, Apple could possibly end up being in the dark with nobody to turn to if things go awry with their tech.

I really am unsure about the direction Apple is going with this. Its bad enough that my router which supports WPA3 trips the DNS Wi-Fi warning now and then when my ISP (UK based IDNet) renew the lease and gateways get changed by backhaul providers.This seems to be an issue which is worse in iOS 15 and lots of people suffer from it as not many devices support WPA2 AES/WPA3 yet still yet Apple has pushed for these changes in the name of privacy causing people to get more warnings when things don't talk to each other properly it seems causing much confusion.

Apple will face challenges I'm sure both in software and now with hardware interoperability possibly with many other devices. The single point of failure Apple has always avoided looks more likely to happen at some point too, if in the end the whole mother board is full of Apple SoCs and nothing else. I guess time will tell how this plays out and I hope it works but I do have my doubts too.

 

[gmarm]

Really nice to see how Apple is building more and more things in-house.

They have proven they can pull it off with incredible results and it's gonna lead to even better hardware-software integration and thus far better products.

Can't wait.

 

[tridley68]

Great news this should have been done long ago.

 

[rpmurray]

Well if apple is diligent with there patent licensing and violates no existing supply agreements that should be no one, unless I@m missing something IANAL

Does that really matter? All it takes is a patent troll or two to find the most tenuous connection to their patents and the game is on.

 

[PlainBelliedSneetch]

Irvine is nowhere near LA.

I’ve had similar thoughts when struck on the 5 in a really bad traffic jam.

 

[mannyvel]

When it comes to standards-required patents FRAND is your friend.

 

[name99]

To steal their talent

Steal? Seriously?

So your mental model of corporate America is that
(a) corporations OWN their employees, who have neither the right nor the agency to find alternative jobs, and
(b) Apple will engage in some sort of illegal coercion to remove these employees from their place of enslavement, and
(c) the legal system will do nothing about either this enslavement, or this theft?

Exactly what useful or helpful is being achieved by calling "Apple will offer these engineers an alternative job, if they choose to take it" STEALING?

 

[Exponent]

Steal? Seriously?

So your mental model of corporate America is that
(a) corporations OWN their employees, who have neither the right nor the agency to find alternative jobs, and
(b) Apple will engage in some sort of illegal coercion to remove these employees from their place of enslavement, and
(c) the legal system will do nothing about either this enslavement, or this theft?

Exactly what useful or helpful is being achieved by calling "Apple will offer these engineers an alternative job, if they choose to take it" STEALING?

Come on, dude - "stealing employees" is just an expression, not a moral judgement.

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

Ah good, a Broadcom employee.

Your guys’s drivers are terrible. Windows and Mac.

I've got zero to do with Broadcom.

I meant it's a stretch that the support period for Macs is determined by Broadcom. As if.

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

Steal? Seriously?

So your mental model of corporate America is that
(a) corporations OWN their employees, who have neither the right nor the agency to find alternative jobs, and
(b) Apple will engage in some sort of illegal coercion to remove these employees from their place of enslavement, and
(c) the legal system will do nothing about either this enslavement, or this theft?

Exactly what useful or helpful is being achieved by calling "Apple will offer these engineers an alternative job, if they choose to take it" STEALING?

You don't think US corporations OWN employees? Wake up and smell the coffee. We are being totalled owned, and have been for 4 decades. The total wealth in this country has grown astronomically, but in real terms, the employees are worse off than they were 40 years ago, whilst company profits, executive salaries, and stock valuations continue to blast through all time highs. Owned. Totally owned.

 

[demodave]

Apple will get there..

The implication, looking at the previous comment, is that Apple will get into silicon manufacturing. I doubt this highly.

Even though Apple moves a lot of units, they don't move a whole lot of units relative to the technology node at which they operate. The fixed costs to make the products that TSMC makes for apple is very high, and I doubt (maybe not highly, but significantly) that Apple's silicon wafer surface area is sufficient to justify these costs in an Apple-only production-released fabrication facility.

Apple are far better off designing at a very high technological node and paying someone else to do the manufacturing.

 

[Tooldog]

In the long run this will be bad for the consumer. As soon as they can, Apple will leverage this against their customers to increase margins for their executives, while leveraging out their competition. Its just the way Apple runs their business in general.