Apple Considered Purchasing Intel's Smartphone Modem Chip Business

Selling the modem business would allow Intel to unload a costly operation that was losing about $1 billion annually, according to another person familiar with its performance. Any sale would likely include staff, a portfolio of patents and modem designs related to multiple generations of wireless technology, said Patrick Moorhead, principal at Moor Insights & Strategy, a technology firm.

Selling the modem business would also prevent one other thing from ever happening:

What is so special about 5G? Sure its faster but LTE is already fast so why is everyone obsessed about 5G? Also, it will take years before the coverage is present so surely there is no rush :)

I’m seeing a 26ms ping on my LTE on my 2017 iPhone X. I just ran Speedtest from inside the office building I work in.

Seems fine, pretty darn low latency really.

Just tested my XS Max (inside our large steel framed warehouse) and got 22ms ping, 45Mbps download and 26 Mbps upload.

I also looked at my history over the years (nice that the Speedtest App keeps a record of all your tests).

On 3G iPhones I had results from 1.5-4.5Mbps.
On 4G iPhones I had results from 5-20Mbps for my earlier devices (5S and 6).
On my XS Max I get between 40-80Mbps consistently.

The difference from 3G to 4G was significant. The difference from 4G to 5G might look good on paper, but will have practically no impact whatsoever on people using their devices. Getting over 40Mbps is plenty fast for any tasks I could reasonably do on a mobile device. It's also plenty fast enough to use as a mobile hotspot for my MBP - I never see slow downs or delays while browsing the Internet or editing documents stored online. It's not like I'll ever need to download multi-GB files when I'm mobile.

5G is just a check mark on a feature list that companies will try to make seem far more important than it really is so they have an excuse to sell people shiny new devices.

What is so special about 5G? Sure its faster but LTE is already fast so why is everyone obsessed about 5G? Also, it will take years before the coverage is present so surely there is no rush :)

What answer do you want? QC's answer is that it is the second coming of christ, the greatest tech advance in human history --- and it can all be yours right now as long as you give them lots of your money.

How about more rational analysis?
- for "normal" phone usage, 5G gives more AGGREGATE bandwidth/tower. This is not important insofar as your indivdiual phone goes faster. What it means is that even as your phone uses more data year after year, and more phones join the system year after year, things don't get slower. No-one (with a brain, so, yes, this excluded 90% of the internet) cares that a SINGLE phone can run at a kabillion bits/sec; what matters is that the cell tower can put a kabillion bits/sec to service all those phones simultaneously connected to it.

- for IoT usage, 5G introduces a new set of much more efficient protocols that allow all sorts of things (security equipment, metering equipment, weather equipment, health equipment, ...) to communicate with the cellular network more efficiently. This is important, useful, and will be of widespread general benefit. But it's also only relevant to the IoT makers and the telcos, it doesn't affect your phone.

- for dense populations (like stadia, conventions, airports, ...) 5GNR (aka mmWave) allows for much higher bandwidth in these localized areas. This is useful if you've ever been upset at how slow your phone is in such environments.
Note, however, that WiFi has its own plan to achieve the same sort of performance boosts in these environments...
So, yes, we understand why QC and VZW want you to believe that 5GNR is ESSENTIAL to your connected future, but it's far from clear that this is actually true; it's possible that WiFi's stake in this area (called WiGig/802.11ad) will get there first and provide a better solution to this particular problem; I've not seen a good analysis either way.

It’s bad for the industry if there is only one supplier.

What is so special about 5G? Sure its faster but LTE is already fast so why is everyone obsessed about 5G? Also, it will take years before the coverage is present so surely there is no rush :)

Exactly! Don’t know about you,but i am sick of all the tech sites keep banging on about it.

Interesting! I wonder if this means Apple has given up on making their own modems? I mean, that would maybe be sensible, but kind of boring/disappointing too.

Far from likely. We don't know the details of their agreement, but I bet they would have insisted on *not* having a non-compete agreement in place with Qualcomm. Buy their chips for now, with no minimum required, meanwhile working on their own modem chipset. We know they want to control this.

I'm just baffled by how complicated this is. Apple is rolling out industry leading A-series chips and other chips (M-series, T-series), but can't manage to get a 5G modem chip ready. I wonder if Qualcomm just holds too many critical patents that is holding this back? Such worldwide tech should not be allowed to be held hostage by a single company, if that is indeed the case.

Sounds to me like 5G is just exceeding the capabilities of our current chip fabrication technology, at least at the miniature scale needed for phones. A new chip design is needed. Let's hope that Apple is exploring new technologies to conquer this.

Interesting! I wonder if this means Apple has given up on making their own modems? I mean, that would maybe be sensible, but kind of boring/disappointing too.

I wouldn't think so. I think it means Apple didn't value Intel's modem chip business. If the rumor was true, the op was losing a billion a year. That's a pretty hefty debt load just to get some patents and IP of dubious value. I think Apple thought/thinks they could develop their own without Intel's "expertise"... which was suspect.

Consider that a 50 ms round trip latency means car traveling at 70 mph will move 5 ft even before any decisions can be made.

26 ms is good for humans but about 10x too slow for AI.

Yeah, no. I work in automotive engineering. There's no way AI or anything related to autonomous driving is going to be offloaded somewhere and have to rely on a flaky wireless connection in order to work. It will all be done on-vehicle.
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Qualcomm was "hassling" apple because apple forced Foxconn and others to stop paying license fees to qualcomm.

Qualcomm was hassling Apple because Qualcomm had an illegal "gag order" clause in their contract to prevent companies like Apple from co-operating with antitrust and other government regulators, and Apple didn't abide by this.

Thank god they didn’t
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What is so special about 5G? Sure its faster but LTE is already fast so why is everyone obsessed about 5G? Also, it will take years before the coverage is present so surely there is no rush :)

The original iMac shipped with 4gb of storage. Needs change over time. Sure 5G might not be “necessary” now, but who knows what our needs will be 5 years from now. Maybe I’ll want to watch live tv in 4K on my tablet. Sure it’s not possible today, but you never know about the future.