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Comment by adwi | Hacker News Reader

Can any electromagnetic (?) engineers here speak to the difficulties in creating these chips/antennas? Surprising to hear about Apple possibly failing at an engineering project for something that already exists, given their resources and access to talent. If true, could it be difficulty in creating new tech that gets around existing patents? Trying to achieve current results with less power? Unable to compete with the economics of just buying existing tech from competitors?

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It's more than "just" a hard technical issue, which are complex but managable RF issues, a gajillion optional modes, complicated corner cases and compatibility with buggy/noncompliant widely deployed in the field.

Apple has to do this without stepping on a welter of Qualcomm patents amassed over decades as the standards developed.

Qualcomm's CDMA patents predated the standards setting process, so was a special case of Qualcomm having the undisputed ownership of a technology that was used in a subset of carriers in the US, for example, Verizon.

However, now that all the carriers have moved to 4G and 5G, which are open standards, Qualcomm can no longer use patents to stop others from competing on a level playing field.

Now they compete on the merits, and companies like Samsung, MediaTek and Huawei are all shipping their own standards compliant modems.

I would expect to see Apple iterate on the tech until they have something they think is good enough to ship.

I think you're referring to the protocol patents which are under FRAND anyway, so Apple can use them (just have to pay). E.g. You can't modulate a certain way without violating a patent, yet the standard requires modulation in that fashion.

I'm considering implementation patents, such as "use a sliding window to filter/damp the amplitude variation due to user wiggling their hand while close to a wall to reduce the amount of re-analysis to change the the best path to the remote antenna"

(BTW I just made that example up for expository purposes)

When the standards setting body is creating a new version of the open standard, your patent cannot be included unless you make a binding commitment up front to license that patent to any interested party without price gouging.

If you won't make that commitment, they use someone elses tech.

Companies simply won't use Qualcomm proprietary tech anymore after having been burned in the past with something they had to maintain for the sake of backwards compatibility.

For instance, there were zero companies on the planet that bought into Qualcomm's recent tech to send text messages via satellite.

> Essentially, the project is dying because Qualcomm couldn't get a single Android manufacturer to add satellite messaging to a phone. Qualcomm's satellite solution didn't require much in the way of new hardware, so the rejection was apparently due to Qualcomm's design of the feature...

Qualcomm says smartphone makers “indicated a preference towards standards-based solutions” for satellite-to-phone connectivity, a plan the company now wants to pivot to.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/qualcomm-kills-its-c...

This has been explained multiples times before Apple even acquired Intel's Modem team. (It is somewhat similar to how Intel 's GPU competing with Nvidia. )

We are edging close to 2024. So some of those notes are nearly 10 years old and they are still true.

Not only on what Gumby have said. ( Apart from the part Side Stepping Patents ) The price on what you are paying for the best Modem compared to the best CPU is tiny. Intel even complained about Qualcomm's modem being so cheap after discount they couldn't even compete on cost, let alone price.

And of course hypothetically Apple could make a better modem, but if it cost them twice as much over 5 years. One may ask is it really worth it? At least Steve Jobs thought it was a good price to pay to Qualcomm when he stuck that deal. Just like how he pay a lot more for the Corning glasses that most now take for granted. Only Tim Cook wasn't happy with it. Also worth mentioning Qualcomm spend the highest percentage of revenue on R&D.

Basically we are now able to have hundreds of people all doing FaceTime at the same time in the same place over a single 5G cell tower. And most if not all working in tech give zero appreciation on how far the Network has evolved.

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