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Inside Apple’s Spectacular Failure to Build a Key Part for Its New iPhones (www.wsj.com)

submitted 1 year ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[–] JWBananas@startrek.website 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Apple had planned to have its modem chip ready to use in the new iPhone models. But tests late last year found the chip was too slow and prone to overheating. Its circuit board was so big it would take up half an iPhone, making it unusable.

Considering how bad some generations of Qualcomm chips have been about this, the Apple chip must have been seriously bad.

“Just because Apple builds the best silicon on the planet, it’s ridiculous to think that they could also build a modem,” said former Apple wireless director Jaydeep Ranade, who left the company in 2018, the year the project began.

Well yeah. It's certainly much easier when you start with ARM reference designs. Apple has what, the modem IP they bought from Intel? A company that, for all its prowess, decided to give up the modem market after only a few years rather than continue to refine the modem that they already brought to market?

Even Samsung gives in and uses Qualcomm modems in the US. And they're a major provider of the baseband hardware on the other end of the connection!

Apple will get there. But there is no way that their aggressive timeline was ever reasonable. Gotta make big promises to the shareholders, I guess.

[–] anlumo@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

Apple tends to over-build their chips. For example, they’re running iOS on their displays, just because that’s what their engineers are used to. This means that the display needs a full blown desktop-class computer in there just for showing an image on the screen. It’s the same story for their wireless routers.

That works fine in environments where power and heat don’t really matter, but that’s completely not the case for a modem.