Hear that, Qualcomm? Analyst claims Apple's homegrown 5G modems to land in 2023 'at the earliest' Nearly two years after Apple swallowed Chipzilla’s smartphone modem business for a cool $1bn, the company is reportedly set to start using its own home-grown baseband chips, starting with 2023’s iPhone. The report comes from Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at TF International Securities with a solid track record of gaining accurate …
Much of the power draw is related to radios and discretes like PAs, which don't shrink well at all. Like LTE which started out running hot and quickly draining batteries and got better over time, so will 5G. But Apple won't have any secret sauce that gets around the laws of physics.
Having the modem's baseband integrated onto the iPhone's SoC will insure it benefits from the shrinks since Qualcomm's discrete modems are usually generation behind Apple's SoCs, that's about it.
This latest alledged "news" seems to imply that Apple is using it's cash reserves to go all "in house" on it's designs, and one assumes that they are not then making profits for other companies, by way of paying for Qualcomm or anyone elses products.
it will also be more difficult for other brands to copy some "new" functionaility, esp if Apple register a load of patents.
Of course they are still improving the bottom line of the actual manufacturers of their idevices and chipsets, but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't bring some (or even all of) this "in house" in due course.
Apple will still have to license patents, but Qualcomm will only get the licensing revenue from Apple but no longer be able to double dip by selling them chips as well.
Apple will be able to cut down the licensing expense though by no longer licensing expensive non-FRAND Qualcomm CDMA patents. There's no reason why an iPhone sold in 2023 or 2024 will need to support anything but LTE and 5G, they can drop all 2G/3G including 3G CDMA.
Yeah I know Europe still has and will continue to have 3G in operation longer than the US, but all that is relevant is how many places have ONLY 3G. There won't be nearly enough such places left by then for Apple to want to complicate their effort by supporting obsolete cellular standards or circuit switched cellular voice. AFAIK the reason Europe is keeping 3G around is because there are a lot of non-mobile devices like fire alarms, sensors, etc. that use 3G, or not forcing people to buy new phones - not because there are areas that will never get upgraded beyond 3G.
Europe never went too crazy on cdma like they did in the states
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CDMA2000_networks
Doesn’t look like there is much, if any, consumer cdma in Europe.
2023 and there should be little need to support 3G cdma, certainly in Europe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G
I'm talking about dropping support for ALL 3G, not just 3G CDMA. That will benefit Apple more since CDMA is non-FRAND and costs more to license, but 3G UMTS patents are still valid and Apple would benefit from dropping those as well and no one is going to miss support for that in 2023 since the number of 3G only towers that haven't had LTE or 5G antennas added will be minuscule.
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