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Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
- brokenmachine 3y agoPaywalled
- nickmcc 3y agohttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/inside-apple-s-spectacular-failure-to-build-a-key-part-for-its-new-iphones/ar-AA1h1wj2 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/inside-apple-s-spectacu...
- lathiat 3y agoReminder: If you have Apple News (or get it bundled with Apple One), it includes access to the Wall Street Journal among many other paywalled sources. On iOS you can use the share sheet to open the URL in news and it will auto-open it. Otherwise you can search for the title. I do wish this feature was better integrated, and using the share sheet to open with any app including News seems always confusing - you're never sure if you have to scroll the list of icons or scroll the list of names, or edit it to add it to both lists, and different apps seem to appear in both lists in different contexts. But it works well when it works :D
- coder543 3y agoWow, I had no idea!
- fergbrain 3y agoNB: News+ only comes with the Premier level of Apple One, not with the Individual or Family tiers.
- leipert 3y agoAlso not in all the countries
- SSLy 3y agoNB: Apple is pointlessly exclusionary and you can't get News or Fitness in most of the world.
- nunez 3y agoSuper top tip. While I have a shortcut that sends these articles to archive.today, I have Apple One and have long wanted to view them without feeling like I was stealing. Thank you!
- continuitylimit 3y agoGreat tip, thanks!
- e28eta 3y agoThanks! I ran into a little trouble where I tried to long-press the link here on HN and use that share sheet to open in News - it’s not there I eventually got there after clicking through to the paywalled article. I kind of wonder what’s different between the two.
- phyalow 3y ago* Cough * https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- brokenmachine 3y agoI'm reluctant to install an addon that has access to all my web browsing for this.
- vdfs 3y ago12ft.io
- ak47lover 3y agohttp://archive.today/X2u4w http://archive.today/X2u4w
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zdyn5 3y agoWhat’s the fundamental reason why SOTA modems are more challenging than microprocessors for Apple? Intuitively I would’ve guessed the opposite was true.
- lbourdages 3y agoI would guess lack of expertise? Apple purchased PA Semi a while ago and the team went on to work on their processors. Have they purchased a company specialized in mixed-signal circuit design? That's one of the key differences, a modem contains a lot of analog circuitry and analog is very different from digital.
- donavanm 3y agoPA Semi was 2008 or so, and Intrinsity in 2009-10. In both cases they came with (more or less) working products, an existing relationship, and coherent engineering teams with an active development pipeline. Its fair to say the intel modem folks have a lot of that individually, but Im not clear how much of the whole transferred over. Edit: and the HwEng org already had established VLSI, SoC, and PCB groups shipping products before those acquisitions happened.
- kalleboo 3y ago> Have they purchased a company specialized in mixed-signal circuit design? They bought Intel's modem business, which was originally part of Infineon. Intel had working 4G modems which were only a year or two behind Qualcomm to the point where most users wouldn't notice. But they never seemed to manage to make the jump to 5G.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago5G is overrated
- kalleboo 3y agoIt may be, but all new network capacity is being built on 5G so a phone without it will suffer more and more in performance, especially in crowded areas/events.
- pram 3y ago“Apple had planned to have its modem chip ready to use in the new iPhone models. But tests late last year found the chip was too slow and prone to overheating. Its circuit board was so big it would take up half an iPhone, making it unusable.” How is this even possible? I mean I get it’s hard but a 3 inch modem chip? lol
- aurareturn 3y agoWait, they needed testing late last year to figure out the chip was physically too big to be used in an iPhone? You're kidding right? Management didn't know until late last year? I call BS.
- scoutt 3y agoThe chip might be small. The required board to use it can be big due to placements constraints, required extra components to make it work, space required for routing antenna traces, heat dissipation, etc. While at those engineering levels you can emulate and foresee all that, sometimes shit simply happens.
- mike_hearn 3y agoMore likely that they wanted to get it working first, within power budget second, and shrinking the board to the needed physical sizes third, but they didn't get to second base.
- duped 3y ago> Wait, they needed testing late last year to figure out the chip was physically too big to be used in an iPhone? The area that a chip takes up is the physical size of the part, any passives it needs, and the space to route the traces to connect them all and meet noise/emf specs. It can take a very long time to figure out if a part is "too big" because it requires iterative design/redesign time by engineers, and it's not knowable before they begin working with the part.
- re-thc 3y ago> I mean I get it’s hard but a 3 inch modem chip? lol It's hard to work around all the patents from Qualcomm etc otherwise you'd get sued.
- willio58 3y ago"Spectacular failure" is a bit hyperbolic to me. They are taking steps to move away from Qualcomm, and it seems their first real go at it resulted in a lackluster product. It's not like Apple actually shipped their phones with that lackluster chip, they decided "hey, didn't work out this go-around". I'm sure they'll get there in another year or so.
- tech-historian 3y ago> I'm sure they'll get there in another year or so. Unlikely, if you read the article.
- willio58 3y ago>The company scratched plans to use it in Apple’s 2023 models, and the planned rollout was moved to 2024. Eventually, Apple executives realized the company wouldn’t meet that goal either. Apple instead opened negotiations with Qualcomm to continue supplying the modem chips. Apple’s licensing deal with Qualcomm expires in April 2025, though it can be extended for another two years. Okay, so 2-4 years?
- hocuspocus 3y ago2-4 years on top of 4 years, plus many years before the business was acquired from Intel, which never managed to ship anything better than a noticeably worse 4G modem. I think that counts as a pretty big failure.
- dang 3y ago"Don't be snarky." "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- vr46 3y agoNice to see that Apple behaves just like many of my clients. You can be as rich as Croesus and still as clueless as <insert economic pundit>
- lencastre 3y agoSpectacular and catastrophic business destroying world ending no good knee to the furniture corner poke your eye and step on a rusty nail failure I must say.
- CamperBob2 3y agoYeah, at this rate, Apple might have to shut down in 83000000 years. They are well and truly beleaguered.
- mcculley 3y agoEvery time a new MacBook Pro is released, I check to see if they have figured out how to put a modem in it like they manage to with watches, phones, and tablets. This is an obvious example where the market is failing. The best explanation I heard is that the Apple deal with Qualcomm pays Qualcomm a royalty as a function of the price of the device and Apple does not want to give that much money to Qualcomm and/or raise the price of a MacBook Pro that much. Does anyone have any evidence on this topic?
- baggy_trough 3y agoThe absence of a modem in MacBook Pros does not mean the market is failing.
- mcculley 3y agoNo matter how much I am willing to pay, I cannot buy what I want. That is a market failure.
- fkyoureadthedoc 3y agoFrom one specific company though, you just don't want one from Dell
- mcculley 3y agoThe choices are Windows with a modem or macOS without.
- baggy_trough 3y agoThat is not what a market failure is.
- lostlogin 3y agoWell it’s not a success, so what it is?
- onetimeuse92304 3y agoI would like to point out that creating modem chips is probably way harder than it seems. It requires knowledge not available to mere mortals. Can you design a new ARM chip with a GPU? Great, you are at most a demi-god. You probably have to be true master of the Universe to be able to design real RF chips. Working with RF seems to be a completely different game than high frequency digital circuitry. When you work with high frequency digital signals you are kind of touching RF stuff, but it is more like you do things that "are known to work" rather than completely understanding everything that is happening.
- kernal 3y agoApple couldn't build a modem chip better than Qualcomm. The top comment should always be a one line summary of the click bait title.