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Comment by RicoElectrico | Hacker News Reader

We're talking about a company whose LTE modems were demonstrably inferior - and then sold that division to Apple.

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/237984-iphone-7s-with-int...

I'd argue that Apple+Intel wasn't that far behind not-Apple+Qualcomm. And the gap was almost entirely closed from 2016 to 2018: https://www.pcmag.com/news/iphone-xs-crushes-x-in-lte-speeds...

> Between the three 4x4 MIMO phones, you can see that in good signal conditions, the Qualcomm-powered Galaxy Note 9 and Google Pixel 2 still do a bit better than the iPhone XS Max. But as signal gets weaker, the XS Max really competes, showing that it's well tuned.

> Let's zoom in on very weak signal results. At signal levels below -120dBm (where all phones flicker between zero and one bar of reception) the XS Max is competitive with the Qualcomm phones and far superior to the iPhone X, although the Qualcomm phones can eke out a little bit more from very weak signals.

I wouldn't say the gap is closed. It's not bad as previous Intel modems but not Qualcomm quality. I had Pixel 2 went to iPhone XR(current phone). In between I also had other android phones (S9, G7 and Pixel 3) for testing purposes. When compared to iPhone XR, iPhone XR had slower speeds when compared to Qualcomm modems. Also if your carrier supports carrier aggregation then the speeds are noticeable. I had do live streams with tethering this summer and Intels modems are not fast as Qualcomm modems.

XR was deliberately weakened in cellular speeds - it had only 2x MU MIMO instead of 4x like on the XS. That might explain what you saw.

Lets be honest here, most of it would be outsourced to Chinese manufacturers anyway. Its just the chips they would build.

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