Apple hires 8 year Qualcomm Engineering VP to its wireless SoC team

LOL.  Sounds like this guy was pretty high up at Qualcomm, and now gets poached by Apple.

This doesn't mean that Apple is developing their own cell radios. All major companies have teams for areas in which their devices function. When they design a product, they need people with expertise in all areas. They also need people to liaison with the actual parts and module designers at other manufacturers. This is particularly true when they have special requirements.

it would be interesting if Apple were looking to design their own radios, but why bother? This isn't as important as their SoC. What I can see is the possibility of Apple gaining a concession from Intel that they couldn't get from Qualcomm to put the radio on the SoC silicon. If that were so, they'd need people with more expertise than they likely had, though Intel would work on that with Apple. 

Apple is rather brash.....considering the lawsuits and isht..

I believe an Mobile would work perfectly.

Go to the Apple Store. Buy iPhone. Turn it on. Simple as that. It seems carriers have been a slight bottleneck for Apple products. Not a big deal but would be awesome to have Apple as my carrier and fix all the damn problems carriers aren't willing to fix.

Every iPhone open to flashing. No data limit on Siri and Apple services. No SIM card needed. So many ideas.

melgross said:

This doesn't mean that Apple is developing their own cell radios. All major companies have teams for areas in which their devices function. When they design a product, they need people with expertise in all areas. They also need people to liaison with the actual parts and module designers at other manufacturers. This is particularly true when they have special requirements.

it would be interesting if Apple were looking to design their own radios, but why bother? This isn't as important as their SoC. What I can see is the possibility of Apple gaining a concession from Intel that they couldn't get from Qualcomm to put the radio on the SoC silicon. If that were so, they'd need people with more expertise than they likely had, though Intel would work on that with Apple. 

There are some good reasons for Apple to make their own cellular modems:

1. It's cheaper. Designing their own cellular modem that's integrated into the SoC and licensing the FRAND IP should be cheaper than buying a 3rd party chip and licensing the FRAND IP. "10 nm" chips will have a LOT of transistors. Devoting some of them for cellular connectivity would be a good thing. 

2. Integrating cellular modems into the SoC will save board space. This would make room for some other component, more battery or some other feature. It could be a double whammy for instance: the cost for cellular connectivity will be cheaper and say they can use 2 lower density NAND chips instead of 1 high density NAND chip. 

3. They can design cellular modems specifically for their hardware. An LTE modem in a Watch? In Airpods? In some other wearable? Their own laptops? For the Watch, it doesn't need to be a multi aggregating band monster. Just something highly targeted and therefore could be optimized for lower power consumption. 

I do do agree that this guy could simply be hired as a VP for Apple's cellular integration work, but there are good reasons for Apple to design their own cellular chips. Cellular bandwidth is at the point of diminishing returns. Driving down its cost in all phases would be a good thing, and making their own would be one way to do it.