Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
wsj.com
wsj.com
The best explanation I heard is that the Apple deal with Qualcomm pays Qualcomm a royalty as a function of the price of the device and Apple does not want to give that much money to Qualcomm and/or raise the price of a MacBook Pro that much. Does anyone have any evidence on this topic?
In order to be a market failure, a whole shitload of people have to want the feature in question, and yet although it could easily be made to happen, the feature is still not delivered. That's a market failure.
Give us a reasoned and researched piece of evidence as to how large this potential market is. Like, how many people would actually buy it, as opposed to all the people who say they'd buy it but then don't actually put up the cash when the feature is delivered.
If you can't prove that market is large enough, then it doesn't make sense for Apple to go to that expense.
For example, how many people would pay enough extra to make it profitable for Apple to include a 192GB memory option for the M2 Max laptops and desktops? The current top end model maxes out at 96GB. How many people would pay enough extra to make it worth Apple's time to double that top end RAM value? I'm sure Apple can do it, it's just a matter of including the next level of higher capacity RAM modules.
What is your provable Total Addressable Market? Startups do this kind of evaluation all the time, and they try to wheedle VCs out of money with those numbers. And VCs poke holes in those evaluations all the time. So, let's do the same thing here.
I am on my fifth MacBook Pro. My first Mac was the 12” PowerBook G4. I bought many more for my employees. I would like to upgrade right now, but it would only be a marginal improvement. If Apple shipped a MacBook Pro today with an LTE modem, I would buy it today, as it would help me with my constant travel.
I would like to open the lid on my MacBook Pro and immediately reply to the email I need to reply to instead of starting up the hotspot and waiting on it to download. iPad and iPhone can do this. That the laptop cannot is ridiculous.
Obviously, Apple has decided not.
The irony is that I agree with you one the point that I'd like to see a MacBook Pro with an integrated SIM or e-SIM card, so that I wouldn't need to tether. Where we disagree is on what process Apple has gone through and what conclusions they have reached on whether they can make enough profit off that function.
Would someone like to bet against this? I would like to invest in a prediction market for this.
Apple thought that they had designed and built their own CPUs, GPUs, etc... so they could easily take this inferior product and turn it into something that was at least as good as what Qualcomm has. They were wrong. The problems they're trying to solve are partly patent encumbered, but only partly. It turns out that the same ecosystem advantages that Apple enjoys around some of their products are also the same effects that protect Qualcomm from competitors, and even as big as Apple is, they still can't break down those ecosystem barriers.
Since Apple is not willing to ship a markedly inferior product, that means they're stuck using Qualcomm modems, until their internal teams can deliver on what they promised. If they can deliver.
“Qualcomm licenses all its patents as a group. For a set fee -- based on the selling price of the end device” according to https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-and-qualcomm-settle-h...
When you squit out 50 models of something per year (like Samsung phones), you can afford for some of them to be more niche products that won't get as wide adoption. When you have only two or three variations on a single product for that year (like Apple), you can't afford that.
Instead, you have to make sure that all the features you offer are either used or usable by the majority of the customers, or that adding those features allows you to add enough to the price that the small number of people who would buy that product for those features will give you a sufficiently high return on your investment that you will be able to at least maintain your profit margin.
There just aren't enough people in the market like you who are unwilling to tether and that fact alone is enough to push them to hardware being made by a different company.
I want the integrated SIM or e-SIM myself, but I'm willing to tether if the integrated option isn't available. So, I'm part of the market that Apple is addressing. In contrast, you're not willing to tether, and so you buy hardware from a different company, and therefore not part of the segment they are addressing.
Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that there are segments of the market that they're not willing to chase, and this is one of those situations.
I do appreciate your faith in the EMH.
Either that, or Apple gets fed up with the whole situation and just buys Qualcomm outright, then maybe strips the components and IP licenses they want, and then turns around and sells the dregs back to the market. But then that would endanger Apple to be the main target of those same kinds of antitrust laws.
Given as entrenched and both Apple and Qualcomm are, I'm not willing to make any bets between the Irresistible Force and the Unbreakable Object.
1. How much more profit can you show that they will make if they take the decision to implement your suggestion?
2. How will this help them better meet their regulatory requirements?
For #1, you don't really have an answer. You would be one customer who would be affected, and you might choose to buy their hardware instead. But how likely is that? Can you prove that? And how many more people are there in the market who feel the same way?
For #2, your suggestion actually makes the regulatory situation worse, since you're now adding a cell phone modem to what was otherwise "just" a computing device. And that brings a whole host of additional regulations into the mix, including import laws and tariffs. And any lawsuit that is filed against Apple that could involve protectionist measures against intrusion of external businesses into local cell phone politics would now be able to stop all imports of all laptops of this type, since any of them could presumably have a cell phone modem in them.
For Apple as a corporation, I'm seeing effectively no upside here, and all downside.
For you personally, there would be a lot of upside. And people like me would also benefit. I just don't see a compelling argument that would convince Apple.
As for the fear over regulation, why do Dell laptops and Apple iPads have modems?
Despite whatever you may think of me, I do hope you're right.
It seems to me that the current monopolies are the reason we don’t have an obvious feature.
I use the tethering almost daily and hate it. I have almost every kind of Apple device. Many of them have modems.
If I had to guess, more enterprise clients that want it.
Seriously doubt it's individuals buying up enough to make it worth it. I mean you won't even buy one right.
Tethering is flaky. I was trying to tether my iPad to my iPhone just last night, eventually gave up and just read my book on my iPhone instead. If I depended on tethering for actually getting my work done I'd have an aneurism.
That settings app is not a happy place.
it's a longer jump to get a cellular capable antenna complex in an all metal (think semi faraday cage) aluminium unibody.
point is, it's historical artifact originally.
now, a decade later, perhaps the BOM thing is just enough motivation to not do it, or the ubiquity of "hotspots" via cellular lessens the appeal at scale.
Its arguably an even shorter jump between iPad and MacBook Pro today - the architecture of both products is incredibly similar now.
> it's a longer jump to get a cellular capable antenna complex in an all metal (think semi faraday cage) aluminium unibody.
You mean just like the aluminium bodies already present on the cellular iPads? Or several generations of iPhone? This excuse doesn't hold either.
ipad and iphone also have antenna designs integrated with the body design, which currently is only true for wifi and bluetooth in the above mentioned laptops.
are you wanting a plastic band atop the laptop closing screen, to get a cellular capable antenna in an otherwise metal body? perhaps that's just not a priority with enough customers.
I'm almost certain Apple's world class hardware team can integrate a cellular antenna to an aluminum laptop in a way that is visually pleasing, yes. This isn't some insurmountable problem we are positing here.
Having built 5G systems for hobbyist computer boards (Pi etc), the antenna required is not so very large either.
A MacBook is not and has never been a seamless block of aluminium - there are plenty of design choices to be made to help hide or minimise any antennas.
My 2020 ipad pro 11” does not have that unsightly plastic band, nor the iphone 15 pro.
As far as aesthetic elements, these enclosures appear essentially as metal and glass, an appearance not markedly different than existing macbook appearances.
Even the iphone mini 13 manages to fit effective cellular arrays in its compact form sans the big plastic bands on those ipads you mention. And despite its diminutive size, the mini 13 can still manage a reliable call over cellular for hours at a time. With the greater real estate offered by the macBook form factor, there are broader options for effective antenna arrays and also their power supply versus phones and tablets.
Is this why the LTE capable Apple Watch has a red ring on the crown? I assumed it was just a status cue.
Regardless, I would be completely happy with Apple having to make a compromise on the case like they do with the iPad.
it's a huge topic, antennas are tuned in physical geometries for wavelengths, etc.
this is a fun rabbithole
This exactly.
The iPad is already like a smaller MacBook without a built-in keyboard that runs iPadOS.
Apparently not.
It's very unlikely that they were not able to, they could have done it the same we they did with other Apple devices that have a modem.
https://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/14/photos-of-a-prototype-m...
When a user takes the active step of tethering, they know what they are getting into.
If mobile data was built right into the computer you’d probably see headlines like “MacBook causes $2000 in data overages”
They have a much better chance to do this in their walled garden environment of iPhones and iPads rather than on OSX where they face competition from other vendors.
They have no incentive to make it easier to be mobile on your macbook when they would much rather you be on your iPhone and iPad instead.
Someday they would really love for macbooks to go away and for everyone to use iOS for everything as they will own the entire environment and competition is much less.
In 2021, the gross margin percentage for the services segment was nearly 70% as compared to the 35% gross margin percentage from the products segment.
https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology-media-an...
In the iPhone days I "force" connected to the phone hotspot through the standard password required procedure and it did better than the other more convenient options.
How is this even possible? I mean I get it’s hard but a 3 inch modem chip? lol
You're kidding right? Management didn't know until late last year?
I call BS.
While at those engineering levels you can emulate and foresee all that, sometimes shit simply happens.
The area that a chip takes up is the physical size of the part, any passives it needs, and the space to route the traces to connect them all and meet noise/emf specs.
It can take a very long time to figure out if a part is "too big" because it requires iterative design/redesign time by engineers, and it's not knowable before they begin working with the part.
It's hard to work around all the patents from Qualcomm etc otherwise you'd get sued.
Edit: and the HwEng org already had established VLSI, SoC, and PCB groups shipping products before those acquisitions happened.
They bought Intel's modem business, which was originally part of Infineon.
Intel had working 4G modems which were only a year or two behind Qualcomm to the point where most users wouldn't notice. But they never seemed to manage to make the jump to 5G.
They probably want their design to work as well as the baseline one, and globally.
Also: "[Apple's modem] chips were essentially three years behind Qualcomm’s best modem chip. Using them threatened to make iPhone wireless speeds slower than its competitors."
A sort of woops, non-strict YAML moment, but in telecommunications.
Despite doing our best to implement the GSM Standards[1], the thing at the time was 19,000 pages long, and one of our biggest issues was that our protocol stack would work well with most cell towers, there would always be some carriers that had configured their network just a tiny bit different, and we had to tweak our software to match that.
At the time, there were 5 major vendors of GSM cells, and none of them had intepreted the standards identically, so we would also have tweaks to allow for different vendors.
I don't remember exactly how many people we employed in our protocol division, but it was more than 100.
I do remember that implementing the first version of bluetooth took 19 people almost 2 years, and that, at the time, was a much simpler protocol (it probably still is). I can only imagine the "horrors" that have gone into 4G and 5G since then.
These days, all of the above problems are "solved" by simply installing a chip. Qualcomm handles any vendor hardware communication issues, and they're probably "big enough" to also have an impact in the opposite direction, making for a more streamlined protocol landscape.
[1]: https://www.etsi.org/standards/get-standards#page=1&search=&...
To the point that testing against a very wide variety of base-stations (and the multitudinous variety of configuration options in those base-stations) is mandatory.
The more I think about this modem development problem the harder it seems to get. No wonder Apple have struggled and nobody else even seems to try. The amount of tribal knowledge and random hotfixes in the Qualcomm firmware alone must be irreplaceable.
We had people driving around with our phones logging to a laptop. They basically drove all over the country, trying to cover as much land as possible, and the phone(s) would then attempt to connect to different base stations.
The logs from this would be sent back to the developers to investigate failures, and somewhat often a bug would only manifest itself on a single cell tower.
Qualcomm has presuably done this work for most of the world, and has subsequently become the benchmark that telcoms calibrate against before deploying cell towers, leading to a more uniform protocol landscape.
If Apple hopes to create a new in-house modem chip, they will either need to calibrate it against Qualcomm, or do the gruntwork of travelling the world. In either case, i'm betting that just using Qualcomm chips regardless of the price will be better from an economic perspective.
Furthermore, everything GSM is covered by patents of the "big 5" (Motorola, Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, I forgot the 5th), which at least at the time had free use of the others patents regarding GSM, but *everybody* else implementing GSM hardware and/or software must pay license fees. Qualcomm and Nokia had a big fight over this 3-4 years ago.
Sounds like Apple needs to put test phones inside the cars doing “street view” as well as have Apple Store employees test them.
I can easily understand different brands/products/generations having their quirks, but I'm struggling to imagine what the source of uniqueness could be for a single cell tower.
Is it a huge variety of config options, that certain combinations of settings turn out to be rare? Or is it literally just something broken like malfunctioning hardware?
GSM is/was a complex beast. Each base station can only handle 8 simultaneous phone calls (the old 2G/3G multiplexed ones, not modern VoIP), so in crowded areas they’re usually configured with a very short range. Some large conferences have had base stations with their range measured in single digit meters (<30 ft).
Furthermore, like WiFi, bandwidth is limited, so base stations are deployed in a “beehive like pattern”, like a triangle with a base station radiating out from each leg, and broadcasting at different frequencies to it’s neighbors.
That alone leaves a lot of room for configuration errors on each individual base stations, but when i say “a single cell tower”, i meant on that drive. The bug might be with a specific firmware version of that base station manufacturer, or that particular hardware revision, or simply a configuration error, or maybe it was a bug in our software and/or radio firmware. There are a lot of “moving parts” that needs to be investigated, but from a developer perspective, the error only occurred on one base station.
It could of course also turn out to be a “broken” base station, and often enough we would fail to find the error, and had to contact the network operator to get them to help trace down the error.
Perhaps you are confusing that each GSM transceiver (TRX) provides 8 time-division channels with call capacity, but most cells and specifically the BTS in GSM parlance, especially any in a well populated area have/had way more than one transceiver. 30-40 was not unheard of in later equipment, though 10 or so was more typical. Late in GSM's life there was another technique to squeeze more channels, OSC.
Furthermore those 8 TDMA slots could be split in 1/2 or 1/4 with lower rate codecs, so it was more than 8 per TRX as well.
anything bigger than a picocell would carry way more than 8 simultaneous calls.
> Some large conferences have had base stations with their range measured in single digit meters (<30 ft)
Femtocells are still a thing today. Not so much to do with frequency capacity.
I was talking 2G/3G. It has been 20 years since i wrote software for mobile phones :) But i should probably have been more specific and said you can have 8 active calls per channel. And i have no doubt today with 4G/5G and a shift to VoIP that you can have way more than that.
> Femtocells are still a thing today. Not so much to do with frequency capacity.
I was attempting to refer to the scalability/complexity of the network, which scales from 10s of kilometers to 10s of meters, or even more/less.
But as i said, i wrote software for the phones. My understanding of the network side of things was/is limited to the rudimentary knowledge needed to write that, and i'm happy to be corrected.
For instance towers around an airport might have some bands running with reduced power or disabled. This reduces cell size/overlap on those towers requiring more frequent handoffs between those towers. A client firmware might have a bug or unrealistic const set that fails in that frequent handoff situation. So it's a bug that only happens on some 5G bands near an airport but only during the summer because the more arid conditions increase microwave propagation by 1dB.
Mobile carriers still do this type whether via contractors or their own staff. Unfortunately, there's nothing that beat boots-on-the-ground field testing with actual devices (plural), which is already notoriously unreliable and prone to noise.
It's especially tough in countries with a large landmass (e.g. Canada, USA, Australia, Russia, China, Brazil, etc.).
One good thing that came out of it was the low power “GPS” on early smart phones, the ones that would triangulate the phones position from what cell towers it could “see”. That would not have been possible without someone driving around “everywhere” and recording GPS location alongside cell signal strength.
As far as i know it is less frequently used today than it was a decade ago, but i could be wrong. GPS in smartphones have moved from technology[1] to something you just use without thinking about how it works.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-break...
When GSM was originally specified, there was serious doubt if it would work at all on the hardware available at the time.
A GSM call has a 3.62us send window, a 3x3.62us waiting period, and a 3.62us receive slot. That’s probably hard enough to achieve on a single cell, but factor in distance to the tower as well, and the handset has to do a lot of calculations.
Once you start considering handoff between cells things get even more interesting. The handset continuously reports a list of cell towers it can “see” along with the strength of their signals from the handsets position.
Once the cell tower decides that the handset is moving out of range, it propagates a handoff message to its upstream node, which repeats this process until a suitable downstream node is found, and each cell tower is then alerted that the handset with an ongoing call is switching from/to that cell, and finally the handset is informed. The handset has no say in this process other than the list of cell towers.
All of this took place in the late 1980s, it was finalized in 1987, and modern processors at the time would be the Intel 386DX running at 12 to 40 MHz. Obviously not handsets came with a 386 processor, and when I worked on mobile phones in the early 2000s, the norm would be something like an 8 to 12 MHz 16bit platform.
Since then the specification has been revised hundreds of times. In the original specification, messaging (SMS) was an afterthought, and a way of utilizing otherwise unused bandwidth, which was normally reserved for command and control. Turns out messaging was a hit with GenX, so many changes were made to that subsequently, like EMS[1], MMS[2] and RCS[3].
Likewise focus shifted from phone calls to data, which was 4G, and to IoT and always on devices, which is what 5G is about. 4G and 5G also has increased the number of active devices possible.
Add to that WiFi calling and all the other little enhancements, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the specification is closer to 50,000 pages today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Messaging_Service [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
It wouldn't be intuitive if people actually have some basic understanding of how modern wireless network works. Unfortunately even those who work on Hardware, CPU design and embedding programming dont understand that. Let alone 99.99999999% of HN.
Probably a mix of things. QCM has a lot of IP/Patents in this space so there are some "intuitive" engineering solutions that ... can't be pursued w/o a license.
But even if there was no legal blockers, RF engineering is a _whole other ball game_ compared to the "routine" circuits used in CPUs. I don't just mean from a "well, the schematic sure looks different" perspective, I mean from a "how you build it in the fab" perspective as well.
TL;DR: if electricity is magic, RF is black magic.
* Nowadays clock speeds are so fast that you have a lot of analog things to worry about with all these high speed serial lines and on the chips themselves. But the domain constraints are in general simpler, with recovery and reconstruction opportunities available due to things like how you structure your protocols. The same is true in radio (came from radio, actually) but when you have a device operating at arbitrary and continually changing orientations, with all sorts of unknown environments outside you get all sorts of unpredictable multipath, loss, ringing and innumerable other problems to deal with.
In the infamous words of Bob Widlar [0]: "Every idiot can count to one."
[0] For those who don't recognise the name, Widlar was a legendary analog designer - along with Jim Williams and Bob Pease.
Getting your modem "certified" with a carrier network requires an absolutely Byzantine set of testing that would stagger your imagination.
And the carriers all like it very much since it enforces their monopoly position just like the old "You must use Ma Bell phones on the Ma Bell lines."
Working with RF seems to be a completely different game than high frequency digital circuitry. When you work with high frequency digital signals you are kind of touching RF stuff, but it is more like you do things that "are known to work" rather than completely understanding everything that is happening.
The top comment should always be a one line summary of the click bait title.
Unlikely, if you read the article.
Okay, so 2-4 years?
I think that counts as a pretty big failure.
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
You can be as rich as Croesus and still as clueless as <insert economic pundit>
I do wish this feature was better integrated, and using the share sheet to open with any app including News seems always confusing - you're never sure if you have to scroll the list of icons or scroll the list of names, or edit it to add it to both lists, and different apps seem to appear in both lists in different contexts.
But it works well when it works :D
Thank you!
I ran into a little trouble where I tried to long-press the link here on HN and use that share sheet to open in News - it’s not there
I eventually got there after clicking through to the paywalled article.
I kind of wonder what’s different between the two.