Apple and Qualcomm become best pals... lol jk the sueballs keep flying Apple filed a countersuit against Qualcomm in the Southern District Court of California today for allegedly infringing eight power-efficiency patents. The pair have been locked in a lengthy game of ping pong over all sorts of fun disagreements – from breach of contract to patent infringement. In July, Qualcomm pitched to the …
I wonder if this is a move by Apple to get the customers of the Snapdragon SOC's to put pressure on QC to settle. After all these customers don't want their SOC supply cut off now do they?
Either way, a plague on both their camps.
Paris because she'd give both of them a handbagging.
There's no more chance of Apple being able to stop import of Qualcomm SoCs than there is Qualcomm being able to stop import of iPhones. The ITC only orders that for egregious violations. This is more trying to point out to Qualcomm that these "other innovations" aside from cellular they claim they hold patents for can be easily matched by Apple who is years ahead of them in CPU design.
Apple wants the case to be about cellular patents alone, because then they can better argue that Qualcomm's method of charging a percentage of the sales price for the phone unfairly gives Qualcomm more money when Apple adds new non-cellular features. Why should Apple including 3D face scanning and an OLED display in the iPhone X, which makes it cost more and therefore sell at a higher price, mean Qualcomm gets more for their cellular patents in an iPhone X than an iPhone 8?
Uncle Clive used "innovative"¹ technology to run his cheap, shitty pocket calculators back in the mid-70s. Maybe Qualcomm can claim prior art.
¹Innovative as in running chips way outside their specs.² Pre-test the chips to see if they performed outside of spec, throw away (or sell on) those that fail. Throw away (or rework) assembled devices that fail production testing. Accept a large number of returns because even those that passed both sets of tests were likely to be marginal and fail as they age.
² He took desktop calculator chips and reduced their average current consumption by pulsing the power rail. It gambled on the capacitance of CMOS gates retaining enough voltage while the power was off that it would not lose state when the power returned. Most of his products relied on using components outside their spec.³
³Including his very first product, the MAT101 transistor. This was at a time when transistors were new and very expensive. His were merely expensive. They were also Plessey transistors that had failed testing and were outside spec, but still retained some marginal transistor action. So that was all he claimed: that they exhibited transistor action and could be used for experimenting, not that they could be used in any practical way.
Almost, but not quite, as deceptive as the Japanese company that bought defective Ferranti transistors. They used them in their radios. The standard superhet design of the time used 6 transistors, and radios from all manufacturers used to boast in the advertising and on the case of the radio itself that they were 6-transistor designs. This company released a 7-transistor radio. The seventh transistor was a dud and not connected to the rest of the circuitry, but the radio had 7 transistors, so was obviously better.
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