without a doubt, the 2020 iPhone is going to be a rush job shipped with loose ends. It doesn't bode well when QC has to publicly state that they're scrambling.
I'll wait for 2021
I'll wait for 2021
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Qualcomm President: Priority Number One is Launching Apple's 5G iPhone as Fast as Possible
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The article is flawed in that it looks at a tiny slice of the wireless industry, the carrier part. The authors are popular-media journalists who are ignorant of the actual hardware and probably never heard of 3/4 of the companies involved. The simple fact is that American companies need to design and produce the best 5G components and capture the market before China can.
Qualcomm is the world's dominant supplier of LTE chipsets for both handsets and base stations. A ton of American companies make LTE RF components like Qorvo (Triquint, RFMD), Anadigics, Broadcom (Avago). Keysight dominates the test of all of these components. These companies obviously need to transition to 5G to maintain their positions.
Cisco, Ciena, Infinera all make money selling the optical backhaul necessary for 5G. Cisco, Juniper, and Brocade will be selling more core routers and switches. Broadcom (legacy) chips go into all of these.
Even NVidia is getting in on the game by processing 5G on their GPUs and Intel has been integrating packet processors for network function virtualization.
As a perfect example of not changing, Ericsson and Nokia aren't going to be able to sell most of their hardware anymore. Carriers will be running 5G software base stations on HP Enterprise cloud servers with GPUs and Intel chips.
I personally know a number of these companies are paying for research at American universities and thus training future engineers. They are the companies who create engineering jobs. If you want to make a big fuss about STEM in America, then it's critical that this American engineering ecosystem remain successful by producing and selling market-leading products.
Last edited:
Apple would rather skip features than introduce phones later
But the Internet and tech blogs told me that foreign countries pay $0.25 a month for unlimited LTE with perfect coverage everywhere!
There's still rural 2G only areas in the UK. In fact, 3G will be taken down before 2G.
If you think most people know what modem they have in their iPhone, I have another bill of goods to sell you.
Apple couldn't have put a modem that is described here in an iPhone. The Intel modems are WAY less terrible than you'd read here.
[automerge]1575498658[/automerge]
It's all business. Apple is going to drop QCOM whenever they don't need them anymore. It's good they can benefit from them for now and they got terms they could live with.
The primary concern is that Chinese brands will dominate all 5G components from antennas to modems to end-user products.
Why is that a concern? Because there is fear that the Chinese government will add some level of (possibly hidden) snooping technology. The world will not wait for some other country to start developing 5G technology, and will be unlikely to pay exorbitant prices (compared to Chinese brands), so governments have been scrambling to create this technology domestically, and affordably.
Is the concern justified? Mostly yes. The Chinese government has been increasingly spying on its own citizens, becoming a literal 21st century version of 1984 or Brazil (the movie). Add to that the rampant IP theft and cyberattacks that they constantly wage against foreign entities. And let's not forget the Bloomberg report that claimed that there were Chinese spy chips on Supermicro server boards (including at Apple). That report was largely debunked (or so it seems), but the rest is solid fact. Regardless of the validity of that report, it is clear that China is intent on spying on its own citizens, and hopefully the rest of the world.
What else is going on? They are also exerting influence via militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea, and engaged in broad debt diplomacy via the Belt-and-Road Initiative. China has ambitions to be the dominant force in the world economically, technologically, and militarily. Surveillance is a big piece of that.
Summary: If China is the first and only viable 5G technology provider, it is possible that the world could rapidly fall under their surveillance with or without our knowledge.
Sure. Qualcomm was supposed to get over $7 billion and ended up with $4.5.
That sure sounds like "settling" to me.
Qualcomm has lost every case so far. To think they were going to pull out a win against Apple is asinine.
Um... Where did you get the idea of $7B from, and regardless of what the one time cost of it may be, it is the Total profits retained that matters, so no matter how well they mask this, the earning speaks, their stock prices speaks, look at Qualcomm right now.
I guess the Front End dont have enough time for testing, I do hope Apple pushes it though. Qualcomm in the Tech Day made some very strong case how the future ( 5G and Beyond ) is about the whole package Modem and Front End.
While one might argue Qualcomm's Front End may not be the best right now, it will certainly deliver the best experience with their modem. And it is only a matter of time before Qualcomm bests out all other Front End suppliers.
This also rise an interesting question, how is Apple going to compete?
Bollocks, I would still be able to use it for the next 5 years no problem. However, the battery life would be of a much bigger concern for me than the speed of my network
None of this modem news is important. What MR forum members seem to care most about is battery health percentage, yellow screens, backlight bleed, notches, and micro-scratches. 
Indeed there are a lot of scaremongering as part of US's anti-China drive. 5G is just being used as a promoter of this, along with Huawei spying, manufacturing jobs, SCS amongst others.
However, what is real is, as Apple and Qualcomm had their fight, and Intel abandoned its modem business, Chinese companies, especially Huawei has been focused on the development of 5G, pushing out numerous patents and advanced products in the field. It's the only company that can provision 5G from the network level to consumers' hands, and cheaply. As such, with dominance over 5G, 6G and others come after, China will be the dominant player in this field, along with the royalties which up to this point has been dominated and controlled by US companies. So the race is not so much what's being framed by the CEOs and politicians of who builds the first 5G network but all the R&D and patents and products, hence market share dominance and control of direction.
I will not have a car until my horse and cart has been fully utilised and optimised!
I am willing to bet the contract included lower prices for Apple. So it wasn’t a complete loss for Apple there. Qualcomm gets to lock in Apple’s business for the next six years (which is also probably the last six years they will see a single cent of Apple’s money).
In the end, just another day in business and life goes on.