Kuo: Apple-Designed 5G Modem May Debut in iPhones as Early as 2023

[Homme]

And people loved intel’s modems…

I don’t know if you are being sarcastic or not but if you aren’t then look up the reactions you got and look up comparisons between Qualcomm’s and intel’s models to see why Qualcomm’s is a lot more superior

I’ll give you a hint, Intels modems are ****, so **** that they were actually developing a 5G Modem which was initially made for the 11 lineup (which were the first iPhones to be rumored to get 5G) and they admitted (before the news of apple buying intels whole modem lineup) that they couldn’t develop a 5G modem in time and that was the reason why the 11/SE lineup got 4G.

so it’s ridiculous to see your post verses the plethora of posts of people complaining about Intels Modems. I rarely see a post of someone complaining about Qualcomm’s modems so do your research before saying “people love Intels modems”

Yeah, keep dreaming. Intel has been making CPUs for a long time. Apple is just starting.

Lol, you see where this is going, right?

more like they are just starting when it comes to ARM on the Mac rather than they are just starting as a whole because they have been developing CPU’s for a long time since the revealing of A4 in early 2010😊

 

[JagRunner]

I don’t know if you are being sarcastic or not but if you aren’t then look up the reactions you got and look up comparisons between Qualcomm’s and intel’s models to see why Qualcomm’s is a lot more superior

I’ll give you a hint, Intels modems are ****, so **** that they were actually developing a 5G Modem which was initially made for the 11 lineup (which were the first iPhones to be rumored to get 5G) and they admitted (before the news of apple buying intels whole modem lineup) that they couldn’t develop a 5G modem in time and that was the reason why the 11/SE lineup got 4G.

so it’s ridiculous to see your post verses the plethora of posts of people complaining about Intels Modems. I rarely see a post of someone complaining about Qualcomm’s modems so do your research before saying “people love Intels modems”





more like they are just starting when it comes to ARM on the Mac rather than they are just starting as a whole because they have been developing CPU’s for a long time since the revealing of A4 in early 2010😊

um he was being sarcastic about people loving intels modems 🤦🏻‍♂️

 

[mngdew]

Apple made a deal with Qualcomm to end their court battle and put their chips into iPhones as a interim step toward their own modems. This is well known as the future. That deal includes some licensing by Qualcomm for Apple building their own modems.

So, Apple will have the following going into this:

Apple Chip Engineering Expertise + Intel Modem Division Expertise + Qualcomm 5G patent portfolio.

I am sure Intel modem business didn't fail purely due to incompetence otherwise Apple wouldn't have purchased it. It likely was due to patents they couldn't impede on that Qualcomm had in its portfolio.

I'd expect Apple's Modem to end up very competitive.

Below is the pie chart of 5G patents. Intel and Apple are among "Others". They got granted a total of 65 patents.
Even if they are allowed to use Qualcomm's patents, they still have to make license deals with the other major patent holders or come up with equal amounts of new patents of their own to leverage the cost.

 

[calstanford]

I don't see how an Infineon-designed (previous 'intel') modem would suddenly be as good or better than Qualcomm. That has never been the case. So while this thing saves the world's richest company some more money, I don't see how it would benefit us users.

 

[Abazigal]

I wonder what it will mean for Qualcomm’s profits once Apple switches to their own modems and not have to pay them a single cent.

 

[rp2011]

Yeah, keep dreaming. Qualcomm has been making modems a long time. Apple is just starting.

The PC guys aren’t just going to figure this out.

 

[hunapu]

I wonder if macrumor would write articles about my guesses for the future

 

[iFan]

Qualcomm makes quality modems and has all the patents in the world but there are a lot of advantages for Apple if they can bring this in-house with something that is even remotely similar performance wise:

1) Launch schedules. Apple needs such high volumes, and Qualcomm releases their new modems on their own timeline. By the time Apple is putting a Qualcomm modem in their phone, it's sometimes almost a year old.
2) Cost. Even with Apple paying Qualcomm a royalty, it will surely be cheaper to make this themselves under their new deal. Possibly enough savings to add modems to additional devices like computers, or make 5G a cheaper add-on for iPads than the current line-up.
3) Customized engineering. Using an off the shelf modem + customized antenna design currently. Perhaps there is an advantage to a custom design modem - or making it small enough to add to future TSMC 3nm or 2nm SOC's instead of a separate chip. Lower power, improved board layout, longer battery?

For what it's worth, I cannot tell the practical difference between my iPhone 12 Pro Qualcomm X55 modem and previous Intel modem, and I used to beta test phones for AT&T (not an engineer, though). Based on Qualcomm's expertise I was expecting a noticeable difference in weaker reception spots, etc. Nada for me.

 

[mfram]

I wonder what it will mean for Qualcomm’s profits once Apple switches to their own modems and not have to pay them a single cent.

Apple may not pay Qualcomm for a modem but they will still owe them for licensing 5G patents no matter whose modem they use. The margin on patent licensing is always greater then the margin on the chips themselves.

 

[Abazigal]

Apple may not pay Qualcomm for a modem but they will still owe them for licensing 5G patents no matter whose modem they use. The margin on patent licensing is always greater then the margin on the chips themselves.

Which doesn’t make sense. I thought the whole point was to work around Qualcomm’s patents, so Apple wouldn’t have to pay Qualcomm a single cent.

 

[michelb76]

Apple only has to serve themselves, so they don't have to compromise and can take a different approach than others. We've seen that time and again. I don't expect miracles from Apple's modem, but it will be more energy efficient obviously.

 

[mfram]

Which doesn’t make sense. I thought the whole point was to work around Qualcomm’s patents, so Apple wouldn’t have to pay Qualcomm a single cent.

No, Apple will have to pay licensing regardless. They just might not pay for the modem. The cost trade-off may not make any difference. Buy a modem or spend $$$ in R+D to make your own modem. Either way, there’s a cost. In the short-term I bet it’s more expensive to roll their own. The issue is control. Some of the factors were brought up earlier. The long-term cost will decide if they keep developing their own modem.

 

[pratikindia]

See prior response. This isn’t intel. It’s Apple combined with Intel’s experience.


ANyway, looking forward to coming back to this thread in a couple of years. Posters will look as dumb as the folks who said Apple could never design great iphone processors out of the gate, or the folks just a year ago who insisted that Apple‘s Arm CPUs would suck for macs.

It’s not same. If intel was on Arm and Apple had created a better processor, then it was comparable. Both are on different architecture. But with Modem, the playing field is same with QC. Let’s see how long Apple can survive this modem business.

 

[syklee26]

Why is nobody talking about interplay between 5G chip and U1 chip? This is where things could get interesting.... airtag with Apple 5g modem could be amazing

 

[m4mario]

Now Qualcomm can be properly attached to another object by an incline plane wrapped helically around an axis.

 

[ksec]

Which doesn’t make sense. I thought the whole point was to work around Qualcomm’s patents, so Apple wouldn’t have to pay Qualcomm a single cent.

Which is why ALL previous discussion on MR with regards to Qualcomm were so much BS.

The patents on 5G/4G are completely different issues to the Chip being used. You will have to paid Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia etc even if you dont make the chip, as those patents are charged per devices. Qualcomm also have patents on things that are *not* related to 4G/5G or 3GPP but on cameras, power management, or other design patents ( Yes design patent sucks but lets ignore those for a min ).

So regardless of what Apple do, as long as you want to use even something wireless you will have to paid Qualcomm one way or another.

What Apple will save money on, are the cost to buying the Qualcomm Modem itself ( Which is actually much cheaper than most people or what Apple make us thought as shown the trial document ) . And whether that is really a cost effective solution remains to be seen. People might be aware ( judging from MR the likelihood of that is not ) Huawei and Samsung are making their own SoC with Modem so it make sense for Apple to do so. But Apple does not make Integrated solutions. They make Modem a separate pieces so they can reuse their A silicon across all kinds of products. There is also an additional level of security with Modem being in a separate layer.

I dont think Apple will ever catch up to Qualcomm from a technical properstive. Partly because Qualcomm have large influence ( in a sense ) the 3GPP development. But I also think it wouldn't matter in 3 years time. 5G /3GPP R17 enter the territory of being good enough for everyone. It doesn't matter as much whether you are leading edge like Qualcomm.

 

[topdrawer]

It’s not same. If intel was on Arm and Apple had created a better processor, then it was comparable. Both are on different architecture. But with Modem, the playing field is same with QC. Let’s see how long Apple can survive this modem business.

what do you mean survive? it's going in their own phones.

 

[haunebu]

Oh yay, now we can all get crap modems again from the Intel (er, Apple) modem team 🙄

Meanwhile, Android phones will have 10 Gbps 5G capability with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X65.

 

[ilikewhey]

They love Apple’s processors (which were great starting with the first one they designed from scratch), so don’t you think that Intel’s experience, combined with Apple’s excellent hardware designers, bodes well? After all, these modems are MUCH simpler than the CPUs.

apple had more than a decade to perfect their arm soc starting from the first iphone, if you wanna use that comparison the first iphone cpu wasn't much compare to the intel core 2 duo back in the dayss

 

[neilpmas]

Yeah, folks.

Keep underestimating Apple here.

We know how that went the last time, right?

Apple is going to eventually "build" everything themselves.

I wonder if screens are next (no more Samsung).

They don’t build anything

 

[ilikewhey]

I don’t know if you are being sarcastic or not but if you aren’t then look up the reactions you got and look up comparisons between Qualcomm’s and intel’s models to see why Qualcomm’s is a lot more superior

I’ll give you a hint, Intels modems are ****, so **** that they were actually developing a 5G Modem which was initially made for the 11 lineup (which were the first iPhones to be rumored to get 5G) and they admitted (before the news of apple buying intels whole modem lineup) that they couldn’t develop a 5G modem in time and that was the reason why the 11/SE lineup got 4G.

so it’s ridiculous to see your post verses the plethora of posts of people complaining about Intels Modems. I rarely see a post of someone complaining about Qualcomm’s modems so do your research before saying “people love Intels modems”





more like they are just starting when it comes to ARM on the Mac rather than they are just starting as a whole because they have been developing CPU’s for a long time since the revealing of A4 in early 2010😊

you did not catch his sarcasm

 

[Abazigal]

Which is why ALL previous discussion on MR with regards to Qualcomm were so much BS.

The patents on 5G/4G are completely different issues to the Chip being used. You will have to paid Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia etc even if you dont make the chip, as those patents are charged per devices. Qualcomm also have patents on things that are *not* related to 4G/5G or 3GPP but on cameras, power management, or other design patents ( Yes design patent sucks but lets ignore those for a min ).

So regardless of what Apple do, as long as you want to use even something wireless you will have to paid Qualcomm one way or another.

What Apple will save money on, are the cost to buying the Qualcomm Modem itself ( Which is actually much cheaper than most people or what Apple make us thought as shown the trial document ) . And whether that is really a cost effective solution remains to be seen. People might be aware ( judging from MR the likelihood of that is not ) Huawei and Samsung are making their own SoC with Modem so it make sense for Apple to do so. But Apple does not make Integrated solutions. They make Modem a separate pieces so they can reuse their A silicon across all kinds of products. There is also an additional level of security with Modem being in a separate layer.

I dont think Apple will ever catch up to Qualcomm from a technical properstive. Partly because Qualcomm have large influence ( in a sense ) the 3GPP development. But I also think it wouldn't matter in 3 years time. 5G /3GPP R17 enter the territory of being good enough for everyone. It doesn't matter as much whether you are leading edge like Qualcomm.

Thanks for the explanation.

So there is no way that Apple could find some way of designing their own 5g chip that doesn’t infringe on Qualcomm’s patents whatsoever?

I guess so long as Apple is paying Qualcomm less overall, it will still work out to be a significant amount of savings given the scale that Apple operates at.

 

[mfram]

what do you mean survive? it's going in their own phones.

The per-unit cost of the R+D developing your own modem vs. buying a modem from another company. The economics might not work out because Apple can only amortize the cost of their modem with their own products unless they sell their modem to others (which I doubt will happen). Qualcomm is making modems for a lot more devices across multiple manufacturers. At some point, that might become a factor.

 

[Eorlas]

Yeah, keep dreaming. Qualcomm has been making modems a long time. Apple is just starting.

apple's hardware design, especially their chips have been making enormous strides. their modem division has existed for 2-3 years now so clearly the R&D will be fairly well developed by the time of the first release.

 

[KENPHOTO]

Yeah, keep dreaming. Qualcomm has been making modems a long time. Apple is just starting.

Don't forget they bought Intel's Modem devision including all technology and patents last year, so they actually have a jump start on modems, they aren't exactly starting from scratch.