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Comment by Danox | Hacker News Reader

If Apple was lazy, they wouldn’t have spent five years getting rid of Qualcomm modems, Qualcomm is also getting squeezed by the Chinese, Mediatek, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung and Apple worldwide.

It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.

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They hate being under someone else’s thumb and Qualcomm had real control over that. They couldn’t stand it and wanted out. Which is just as well, because clearly Qualcomm could’ve been doing better. Apple cut the power usage of the chip and it’s reportedly better than the Qualcomm one.

> It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.

Care to postulate on what those nefarious reasons/surprises could be?

Imagine NVIDIA on steroids. Think bad documentation, opaque code, and everything being locked down. The customer gets squeezed for more money (especially egregious if you don't have enough scale they won't even bother engaging).

Onavo is correct: Qualcomm are extremely notorious for aggressive IP enforcement. They're the Oracle of hardware. In particular they held critical CDMA patents which were required for making a modem which worked in the US.

They (along with Intel) also ended up making most of the non-Apple ARM chips, which are not competitive with the Apple ones.

I'd have assumed Qualcom are looking at the Steam Deck / Steam Machine and Steam OS, and thinking: "I might want some of that."

And looking at the direction Microsoft is going, and thinking: "Shackling our laptop and desktop chip sales to this is a bad idea."

The entire landscape outside of the Raspberry Pi is a shitshow in terms of "Just download a distro for your device class and arch and it'll work."

Arm SystemReady appears to be a slow push in the right direction from the opposite end.

They must think they will sell more chips to OEMs that want to offer Linux. It's not like they're going to be shaking down Debian for cash.

If Apple cared about quality, they wouldn't have gotten rid of Qualcomm modems, and forced people to use the inferior Intel modems. I always avoided by iPhone models with Intel modems starting around the 6S era.

What specific quality issues did you notice? I haven’t heard of any, but I wasn’t paying close attention at the time.

The Qualcomm models were faster. I’m not sure if they were better in low signal conditions.

The Intel models were worse, but they weren’t bad as far as I know.

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