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It's hard to believe Apple did not look at the BOM from day one as a future internalised profit moment. After all it's what they did with Wolfson chips in the i
by ggm 2y ago
It's hard to believe Apple did not look at the BOM from day one as a future internalised profit moment. After all it's what they did with Wolfson chips in the iPod: used them until they understood how to replace them and then dropped them.
Qualcomm is hardly cheap, but per-phone it's also hardly expensive. At one remove, this is a fight between two dogs with no up or downside for me as a consumer because in all likelihood Apple will keep prices high: It's seeking to reduce cost, not price.
If somebody has evidence the cost of Qualcomm IPR has influenced Apple pricing and we can expect a price drop, I'd love to understand it.
Moving upstream, is Apple going to take over the Qualcomm research function and start owning the IPR behind encoding and RF technology?
Wouldn't buying qualcomm have achieved the same outcome? Buying their IPR wholesale instead of retail? Thats what Google did with Motorola: bought the entire box, kept the three pokemon cards it liked (the retained IPR, a small amount), and sold the rest to Lenovo.
- xyzzy123 2y agoRe: research I was under the impression IP licensing was a major issue with cellular modem development (i.e, the "patent minefield"), I wonder how they are navigating this.
- dartos 2y agoThe budget for the legal team is probably larger than the gdp of most countries
- manuelmoreale 2y agoI’ll just have a guess and say there’s zero chance Apple will cut prices. They want to lower costs but I’m sure they’ll also use this as an excuse to increase prices justified by all the investments.
- NotMichaelBay 2y agoI would consider it a downside to consumers if there are no savings or benefits passed on; they are paying in opportunity cost. I'm assuming there are other efforts that would be beneficial to consumers that Apple is not spending time on.
- Pet_Ant 2y agoI assume the point of Apple owning their own modem is not just not to pay Qualcomm, but also to integrate more deeply. I’m betting that they’ll be able to integrate it with their CPU and perhaps reuse the ALU so that there is efficiency there and maybe a boost in battery life or a thinner device.
- saurik 2y agoFWIW, if Apple wanted to maximize long-term benefit (not saying they are, but also am not wanting to say they aren't), even if there were no benefit from doing this (which I actually doubt) and even if there were no price reduction, they would still get around to doing this action as it would let them invest more money later into engineers that work on things they care about, as opposed to things Qualcomm cares about, and hopefully/maybe that correlates with things you/I care about.
- someguydave 2y agoI suspect Apple wants to enable proprietary wireless features and they don’t want to involve Qualcomm in their IP
- jorvi 2y agoApple can’t. Qualcomm’s special area of expertise is in cellular, not WiFi. And cellular is specced and regulated to the extreme. There’s nothing extra Apple can do that Qualcomm isn’t. They can optimize, but they can’t revolutionize.
- someguydave 2y agoAll true but there is more to RF than correctly implementing cellular comms
- piltdownman 2y agoNTN 3GPP Specs are only now being properly evaluated and set, with Ericsson/Qualcomm/Thales partnering to POC the tech on a 5 year roadmap. In the interim, a number of companies like Apple and Samsung are now offering Satellite based SOS Emergency Text services as a commercial reality, presumably straining the capabilities of the current modems to their capacity. Cellular is specced and regulated to the extreme between the FCC/3GPP Standards, but working within those constraints you already have two viable D2D Satellite 4G companies rolling out commercial services for unmodified cellular devices - ASTS and Lynk - with Lynk already offering commercial services. They could well be optimizing and revolutionizing in one go - particularly to support new paradigm shifts in the US Market Service provisionment. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240529554741/en/AST-SpaceMobile-and-Verizon-Announce-Plans-to-Target-100-Percent-Geographical-Coverage-of-the-Continental-United-States-from-Space-on-Premium-850-MHz-Cellular-Spectrum https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240529554741/en/AST...
- someguydave 2y agoIndeed, not to mention they could also optimize their bluetooth & wifi integration with cellular and space comms plus customized array processing. I also suspect Apple is working on other proprietary personal wireless systems