Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/apple-modem-chip-qualcomm-failure-18381230.php
Apple used billions of dollars and thousands of engineers on a ‘spectacular failure,’ WSJ reports::Apple’s “spectacular failure” to build a modem chip for its new iPhones was the topic of a Wall Street Journal expose Wednesday.
Pretty sure a company with nearly a $3 TRILLON dollar market cap can afford to spend a few billion just trying things for kicks if they want. It doesn’t make it a failure, it makes it R&D.
I wonder what the takeaway was? They successfully designed processors with the m1 & bionic chips, so super curious what blocked them here. Are modems harder to design than processors? Maybe it’s the RF part?
If someone patents the wheel, it’s very hard to make a car.
Highly recommend reading daringfireball.net’s takedown of this nonsense
Original article wsj.com/…/apple-iphone-modem-chip-failure-6fe33d1…
Archive link archive.ph/i7KtJ
jet@hackertalks.com 1 year ago
Spectacular failure is not generous. I would say Apple is doing the right thing. They want to develop their own vertical stack for their hardware. Even if the current endeavor is unsuccessful, they’re building the skill set to do it in the future. Let’s not forget Apple has a massive global phone footprint, so they’re a massive consumer of these cellular modems.
Even if they don’t have the chip ready to go at this moment, it gives them negotiating leverage with the modem manufacturer, namely Qualcomm. Having a thousand engineers, billions of dollars invested, and prototypes going on… That’s negotiation leverage. Many business deals are done by capabilities, so if you’re developing a capability you might get a better deal, so you don’t accelerate that capability is growth.
Not to mention if Apple builds their own modem silicon, they would be in a position to sell it to other people.
I think this is just a reasonable business development, the article is breathless and over the top, I would expect nothing less from any extremely large organization, to at least try to bring feature parody in their own pipeline even if it’s more expensive, it’s a good option to have on the back burner.
jonne@infosec.pub 1 year ago
When companies try to innovate under capitalism, suddenly that’s a bad thing to the WSJ. I thought it was supposed to be about innovation and risk taking? Especially if the company is Apple and they have more money than they know what to do with.
jet@hackertalks.com 1 year ago
Let’s be generous and say they’re not trying to induce clickbait.
Maybe from an investor’s perspective, a long-term investment with a return horizon beyond 5 years, falls outside of most investors timelines. From that perspective you could say this makes Apple a not great investment.
But if your time horizon is 10-20 years. Apple creating leverage and independence is a great thing.
The personally I think they’re just going for clickbait at this point
phillaholic@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Look, you clicked on it didn’t you. You were interested in the topic, WSJ is in the business to make money based on people’s interest.