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Kuo: Apple's Work on 5G Modem Chip 'Failed,' Qualcomm to Remain Supplier for 2023 iPhones

Spaceboi Scaphandre said:
I'm not the only one who's completely disinterested in 5G right?
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Nope. 4G LTE is more than fast enough for my mobile needs. I’ve never once thought “I was this were faster.”

I know I’ve got the faster speeds back at home for the heavy lifting. And no data cap, to boot (are you listening Verizon?).

But 5G generates buzz on commercials, I guess.
 
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RF is hard because interoperability is hard.

Traditionally, Apple engineering has been able to write to the spec and the rest of the industry eventually follows. In RF everything is legacy, so you have to work with all this old misconfigured and misbehaving equipment.

5G isn't enough, you need to be able to fall back all the way to EDGE (EDGE still exists in the rest of the world and in some places in the US). Thank god all the analog networks are dead...that would be an even bigger nightmare.
 
atomic.flip said:
Keep in mind that even the amazing M series chips are based on open sourced ARM designs. Which have strong competition from other ARM chip designers (ARM included).
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No, Apple made its own arm-cores which are using the same instruction set. They may have started with a core from ARM, but they had their own design very early in the game. One distinct proof for that was having a 64-Bit-ARM-Core when Qualcomm said that 64 Bit are not important for smartphones.

It‘s basically the same situation now, they have the old intel-modem-layouts and started to make their own, but now we have a delay. I don‘t think this delay will make a big difference in the long run.
 
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What people either forget, or never figured out in the first place: without Qualcomm's invention of high-speed cellular data technology, the iPhone as we know it simply would not exist. For this alone Qualcomm deserves its share of Apple's profits, for reasons both capitalistic and karmic.
 
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v0lume4 said:
Nope. 4G LTE is more than fast enough for my mobile needs. I’ve never once thought “I was this were faster.”

I know I’ve got the faster speeds back at home for the heavy lifting. And no data cap, to boot (are you listening Verizon?).

But 5G generates buzz on commercials, I guess.
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It also generated some delicious scrubquotes in eSports games. "Why am I lagging so much I'm supposed to be on 5G. No I don't need ethernet my wifi is good, your connection is the one that sucks."
 
ThailandToo said:
I want Samsung manufacturing the display and Qualcomm manufacturing the 5G modem. Those two companies get those two things right way better than any other company. Competition is good, but unless Apple pulls off a miracle, I am glad to have Qualcomm.
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I mean, I'm still pissed at Qualcomm for killing Eudora. It really was the all-time best GUI mail client.
 
This is misinformation. Apple are actually dropping their own development of 5G modems (or any G modems for that matter) in favour of satellite communication.
 
svish said:
There could have been some battery life gains with Apple’s own modem but Qualcomm should be good enough!
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Especially with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X65 that will be on the iPhone 14 models. They'll be more power efficient than the Snapdragon X60 used on the iPhone 13 models.
 
Not failed - Intel failed. Apple's chip is 'delayed'. Designing & fabricating radio chips, I have read, is even more complex than CPUs. Qualcomm has excellent chips - hence why Apple uses them now and in future products... until Apple can create something better.

Apple has too much at stake to release a chip before it is ready, tested, reliable, and outperforms the competition. This should surprise no one. They never publicly announced when they would release their own chip, they haven't even publicly acknowledged its existence! They are approaching it the same exact way as they always have ... Apple Silicon is a prime example, it took years to design, create, test - when it launched it exceeded expectations ... and the roadmap projects even greater performance. I'd rather wait until perfected before it finds itself in products rather than hit a rumor-mill defined deadline.
 
Analog Kid said:
It’s remarkable when a technology is so complex that a company with the capabilities of Apple is struggling to get it done. For all the talk recently about consolidation of market power, this is part of the reason— at the pinnacle of technology development there simply aren’t many entities capable of pulling it off.
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It’s not about company size as entrepreneurs have shown time and time again; from Elon Musk disrupting the auto industry to the Wright brothers inventing flight.

When IBM was on top, their computers were considered the pinnacle of technology and they were more powerful than Apple ever will be, but it took a couple of risk-takers in a garage (who had the advantage of not being indoctrinated in college to think and act like everyone else) to take down the most dominant tech company the world had ever seen, and probably will ever see.
 
Spaceboi Scaphandre said:
It also generated some delicious scrubquotes in eSports games. "Why am I lagging so much I'm supposed to be on 5G. No I don't need ethernet my wifi is good, your connection is the one that sucks."
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eSports over a wireless connection? Oh no 😅
 
RogueWarrior65 said:
My guess is that the available chip foundry capacity split between Qualcomm and Apple is the real problem.
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That doesn't make any sense. It's not like the capacity reserved by Qualcomm for Apple suddenly goes to another smartphone manufacturer. Who is filling the demand for the modems that Apple no longer wants?
 
v0lume4 said:
eSports over a wireless connection? Oh no 😅
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It's more common than you think. Wifi scrubs are everywhere. It's why it's your duty to set them straight and clown on them when they refuse.

EWoEGw3VAA4AM9d.jpg
 
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Karma*Police said:
It’s not about company size as entrepreneurs have shown time and time again; from Elon Musk disrupting the auto industry to the Wright brothers inventing flight.

When IBM was on top, their computers were considered the pinnacle of technology and they were more powerful than Apple ever will be, but it took a couple of risk-takers in a garage (who had the advantage of not being indoctrinated in college to think and act like everyone else) to take down the most dominant tech company the world had ever seen, and probably will ever see.
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The Wright Brothers didn’t invent flight, they contributed to the development of flight.

Tesla has enormous resources at its disposal.

Most small entrepreneurs start small and need to achieve scale to take on truly complex developments.

Sure, every now and then someone comes out of nowhere to make a difference, but the fact we know their names demonstrates how unusual it is. Most really complex design requires the resources of a large enterprise.
 
Analog Kid said:
The Wright Brothers didn’t invent flight, they contributed to the development of flight.

Tesla has enormous resources at its disposal.

Most small entrepreneurs start small and need to achieve scale to take on truly complex developments.

Sure, every now and then someone comes out of nowhere to make a difference, but the fact we know their names demonstrates how unusual it is. Most really complex design requires the resources of a large enterprise.
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Let’s not get pedantic… for all intents and purposes, the Wright brothers are credited with inventing flight for a reason.

Tesla had pennies to the dollar of the established auto companies.

You missed the point entirely. You don’t need to be a big company with immense resources to achieve big results, and it’s entirely possible for a few guys to come up with a radio that’s superior to QCOM’s or AAPL’s. Just because it’s relatively rare doesn’t negate that fact.
 
haunebu said:
This is symptomatic of Tim Cook's leadership. Apple hasn't had a significant hardware breakthrough since the iPhone in 2007 (even if the Apple Watch does reasonably well). The A4 through M2 is great, but it's extending existing technology from ARM rather than ushering in new use cases like an iPhone. Tim is an expert at squeezing suppliers and cutting them out of the chain in order to reduce costs and maintain profit margins in absence of innovation. He optimizes for cost. Makes sense for the former COO / supply chief.

But it doesn't always work out, and the 5G modem is case in point.

So Apple has spent untold amounts of money on recruiting Qualcomm talent for modem development in Apple's new San Diego office, but this is the result: failure to launch. So there's a real cost to Tim Cook's penny pinching here.

I miss Steve's Apple.
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Thank you for getting what I have been saying for ages, Tim Cook is useless and needs to go.
 
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FunWithFoons said:
What people either forget, or never figured out in the first place: without Qualcomm's invention of high-speed cellular data technology, the iPhone as we know it simply would not exist. For this alone Qualcomm deserves its share of Apple's profits, for reasons both capitalistic and karmic.
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No! That is like saying Ford deserve the lion's share of profits from all other car makers because without Ford's production line innovation they would not exist.
 
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