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Comment by lbourdages | Hacker News Reader

I would guess lack of expertise? Apple purchased PA Semi a while ago and the team went on to work on their processors. Have they purchased a company specialized in mixed-signal circuit design? That's one of the key differences, a modem contains a lot of analog circuitry and analog is very different from digital.

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> Have they purchased a company specialized in mixed-signal circuit design?

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.

5G is overrated

It may be, but all new network capacity is being built on 5G so a phone without it will suffer more and more in performance, especially in crowded areas/events.

5G is absolutely insane. 100Mb/s for 20 USD/mo on a mobile phone in Hong Kong is absolutely mind-blowing. I suppose in low density areas like Tokyo, New York or Paris, it might be slower in some patches ?

What are you doing on a handheld device screen that would blow your mind once the novelty of seeing the big numbers on speedtest app wore off? Genuinely curious- what can you do on 5G phone that you can’t on your 4G phone?

Among other things, 5G works better in crowds. And the faster your transfer finishes, the faster you can turn the antenna off and save power.

A reasonably frequent usage of this speed is for families to switch over to mobile internet as the primary service for your home, having multiple people watch "TV" and videoconference all while someone is gaming (or dowloading a 40 Gb game) all through a single 5G modem.

Run a faster hotspot.

Upload video, sync photos, backup the phone, watch 4k movies, etc

I typically get around 300-600 Mbps on 5G, but in some areas I've seen speeds up to 1.3 Gbps (on NR, not even mmWave). This is in a Japanese city of pop 300,000

Able to get a consistent 1000Mb/s in Aus (Melbourne) outdoors. You're not wrong, it's wild to see in action!

PA Semi was 2008 or so, and Intrinsity in 2009-10. In both cases they came with (more or less) working products, an existing relationship, and coherent engineering teams with an active development pipeline. Its fair to say the intel modem folks have a lot of that individually, but Im not clear how much of the whole transferred over.

Edit: and the HwEng org already had established VLSI, SoC, and PCB groups shipping products before those acquisitions happened.

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