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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

One of the recent phones (X or 11?) used Intel for part of its builds (as far as I remember you couldn’t tell from serial number). Apple had a lot of problems and swore off the Intel parts, which killed Intel’s wireless business.

I assumed Apple bought the Intel product line for IP, especially after that episode.

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Apple used Intel modems for many generations - the iPhone 7, X/8, XS, 11. For some generations they used Qualcomm chips in the models for CDMA regions since Intel didn't make a CDMA modem. So you could tell which chip you'd get from the iPhone model number.

Apple ditched Intel due to Intel being at least a year behind on 5G.

These modems were all LTE modems though. They've always used separate Broadcom chips for WiFi/Bluetooth.

> due to Intel being at least a year behind

That's not the only thing Intel is at least a year behind on.

> "For some generations they used Qualcomm chips in the models for CDMA regions since Intel didn't make a CDMA modem."

Yeah. The Qualcomm-equipped international version of the iPhone X notoriously got significantly better LTE speeds compared to the Intel-modem version sold in UK/Europe.

the iPhone 7 used the intel wireless chip. it was a major downgrade for me from my iPhone 6 at the time: speeds were lower for data transfers, and reception was less (could be attributed to an antenna change?)

overall, I was very happy to get a phone that didn't use the intel chips.

>which killed Intel’s wireless business

I was under the impression that modern laptops ship with intel WiFi cards (I think I saw some Lenovo laptop use it). Do you mean it killed their modems ?

WiFi and cellphones are both wireless, but this discussion is about cellphones.

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