Inside Apple’s Spectacular Failure to Build a Key Part for Its New iPhones
Inside Apple’s Spectacular Failure to Build a Key Part for Its New iPhones
The company set out to design a silicon chip that would allow it to cut ties with Qualcomm, a longtime supplier and bitter foe.
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Content of the article aside, I think these business publications are running out of thesaurus entries for clickbait titles. I wouldn't consider it a "spectacular failure" that Apple could not finish a modem in time for the iPhone 15 launch, especially considering the smashing success that they've had pushing out Intel and making some of the most popular consumer electronics on the market.
Apple should eventually find success in going vertical with the modem, and when that happens, Qualcomm will learn what being difficult costs.
especially considering the smashing success that they've had pushing out Intel
That's kind of the point being made in the article, though: they could succeed in the chip game thanks to a multi-decades head-start from ARM, and a decade on top of that of co-developing semi-custom designs for the mobile market. Apple management convinced themselves that this would be a repeatable feat, oblivious to the fact that modem is a the completely different beast.
Apple should eventually find success in going vertical with the modem, and when that happens, Qualcomm will learn what being difficult costs.
Apple is throwing billions a year at a problem they vastly underestimated, and is far from done yet. If one thing, they are only now grasping the true cost of what they were paying for (and complaining was too expensive). I hate Broadcom just like the next guy, but Apple was just employing bully's tactics to have Broadcom cave, and in the end they were right not to. In the end Apple may succeed, and that will only be good for us, consumers.
That’s kind of the point being made in the article, though: they could succeed in the chip game thanks to a multi-decades head-start from ARM
Apple basically created ARM (look into the history of the chip design company).
Who knows, maybe in 30 years their cell modem efforts will be good enough to use. Or maybe not. I don't think Apple really minds either way there's nothing wrong with Qualcomm chipsets.
Apple historically can't or won't bring mixed signal design in-house. It could be related to patents, standards compliance, or the much more complicated silicon design, DV, and test for analog vs digital. It's not just the modem either. The bulk of Cirrus Logic's business nowadays is making audio, haptics, and focus servo chips for Apple, and if Apple ever went vertical with those components Cirrus would collapse overnight. Yet Apple has been buying custom audio chips from them for over 30 years, so obviously this isn't a new trend.
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.
Considering how bad some generations of Qualcomm chips have been about this, the Apple chip must have been seriously bad.
“Just because Apple builds the best silicon on the planet, it’s ridiculous to think that they could also build a modem,” said former Apple wireless director Jaydeep Ranade, who left the company in 2018, the year the project began.
Well yeah. It's certainly much easier when you start with ARM reference designs. Apple has what, the modem IP they bought from Intel? A company that, for all its prowess, decided to give up the modem market after only a few years rather than continue to refine the modem that they already brought to market?
Even Samsung gives in and uses Qualcomm modems in the US. And they're a major provider of the baseband hardware on the other end of the connection!
Apple will get there. But there is no way that their aggressive timeline was ever reasonable. Gotta make big promises to the shareholders, I guess.
Apple tends to over-build their chips. For example, they’re running iOS on their displays, just because that’s what their engineers are used to. This means that the display needs a full blown desktop-class computer in there just for showing an image on the screen. It’s the same story for their wireless routers.
That works fine in environments where power and heat don’t really matter, but that’s completely not the case for a modem.