Apple deleted a job listing that hints at plans to cut Qualcomm and Intel chips

They could have certainly put out the job posting for visa reasons :)

http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=APPLE+INC&job=&city=&year=2...

If you consider just this one data point yes, it may seem far-fetched. But if you connect it with all the other data points from all the other rumors, then whose to say it's over reaction?

I'm sure investors probably pay attention to that already. That would be an interesting thing to game, actually.

I often check the job listings of competitors to see what they are up to, so using this as part of a "what are these companies up to" (patent filings, job listings, various updates) would be good. It's a hard problem because some companies generate a lot of noise (unenlightening press), or some companies are large so have lots to talk about in areas that don't matter to me, but typically most startups generate so little noise that simply sending me 100% of new news, website changes etc would be useful.

It's also for security. If you've read Kevin Mitnick/Irea Winkler books like Art of Intrusion or Corporate Espionage (1997!) they say monitoring a competitor job ads is great to learn about:

1. Current trends. 2. Infrastructure

And more, I can't recall....great books too.

Indeed. It strains reason to think that a company with cash reserves the size of Apple's wasn't at least exploring the possibility of making their own radios. Hiring a few experts on a moonshot project is cheap relative to the benefits if it pays off. It's likely Google has a similar group.

Whether they produce hardware or not is an open question though. High end RF efforts tend to fail a lot. I mean, for high end LTE we're already in a situation where there are only two serious vendors.

> Wouldn't an organisation such as Apple (who must be one of Qualcomm's largest customers, surely...) already share design information such as this with engineers inside Apple?

I don't see your point, and besides, Apple silos their information so that it's only available on a need-to-know basis.

The problem facing Qualcomm is that their main customer for high end modems is Apple, the units they sell to the Android manufacturers are much lower volume (at the high end) and for much less money.

Apple has noticed that if they make these advanced modems themselves, the Android ecosystem doesn't have enough profit in it to make building high end modems just for that market viable. At least, it might well force Qualcomm to design down their best modems to meet lower price points at lower volumes than they can achieve now.

This is aside from the advantages Apple would have in tailoring their hardware and software to each other, and guaranteeing they get the hardware features they need to achieve their end-user facing feature goals.

Apple can't build the Macbooks they want because Intel doesn't deliver the chips they need. I'm sure they want to avoid that situation with their iPhone.

Additionally, the problem with Qualcomm is that Apple thinks they are charging too much on patent licensing fees — by doing research and building up their own patent portfolio, they will have better leverage in license negotiations even if they use Qualcomm chips.

> I wonder what would be the benefit of Apple producing their own chip? Especially with the threat of "peak iPhone" looming.

Isn't that exactly the answer? If you have reached market saturation, you optimize for cost.

Ah, but the market is not efficient. Apple's priorities for very specific chips with specific interfaces and specific power requirements very likely don't always map to their vendors' own interests in selling fewer products to a wider variety of customers on timetables that match their own capital investment cycles. Apple is lucky to be a big enough buyer to have a lot of influence, but if Apple can spend a few hundred million to build a pipeline for radio chips that save them a few dollars each, and take less space, use less power, and are more tightly integrated with their OS and SOC, then it will pay off very very rapidly at their scale.

And if it doesn't work out, then the market will still be there for them.

Lots of possibilities. One simple example is maybe Apple thinks they have a 'special case' problem that other 5G modem suppliers aren't going to solve.

Also, theory is all very well but the timespans matter and aren't general. Someone has to physically be the first person to do a new thing. Apple's experience with the original iPhone was that competition caught up eventually. But in the years it took the competition to set up R&D, supply chains, yadda yadda, Apple could cement a dominant market position and turn crazy profits. They might see similar opportunities in other communications technologies (although not on the same scale).

Ensuring privacy for their users?

It was a matter of time, really. They already design their own and basically own all, if not the vast majority, of the production capacity of TSMC.

Wasn't that the exact response when Apple introduced the iPhone? "They have no experience making cell phones!"

They can afford to pay to learn.

Steve Ballmer agrees wholeheartedly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

Looking at the article - this is related to the Cellular modems in their telephones as opposed to the CPUs running in their Macintoshes.

Judging by Apple's success in creating powerful low energy ARM processors I'd be quite interested in seeing how they can do in designing their own 4/5G modems.

I’m keen for an understanding of how this would affect me, can you elaborate? I would assume the performance would need to be better for them to make the change + battery life.