Apple reportedly building iPhones, iPads without Qualcomm chips

arstechnica.com

25 points·rbanffy··3 comments

Qualcomm has to decide which impacts its business more: loss of Apple as a customer, or drop in revenue per chip due to licensing.

Obviously, Qualcomm doesn't want either, which explains the lawsuits filed. But if Apple can turn to Intel and MediaTek as suppliers, that cuts Qualcomm completely out. What choices does Qualcomm have left other than to capitulate to and mollify Apply?

It's fascinating to watch two large corporations publicly duke it out. I think Qualcomm has overplayed their hand. I'm not sure what other customers they have (probably Androids?), but without Apple, what does Qualcomm become?

Pretty sure Apple is identifying a less hostile vendor to bridge the gap until they are producing their own modems.

Maybe loss of Qualcomm's proprietary air interface standards as significant components of future cellular standards? The risk to Qualcomm is massive, maybe more so that the revenue from their own chips.

Apple is in a strong position to move to a horizontally integrated AP/BP model for mobile, either with ARM cores and their A8/A10 SoCs or even moving to something like RISC-V.

Now add an RF frontend and DSP cores and you could implement 5G or smallsat connectivity for the price of the RAND IP license.

Then replace the OLED with microled/qdot pixels with Primesense sensors integrated and you can even eliminate the "slot".

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