Roger Fingas
Apple was indeed in talks about potentially buying portions of Intel's cellular modem business in order to speed up its own internal modem development, a report claimed on Friday.
Conversations began in summer 2018, and continued for several months, according to the Wall Street Journal. They ended, however, by the time Apple reached its settlement with Qualcomm earlier this month. Intel announced its departure from the 5G modem business the same day.
Intel is now looking at "strategic alternatives" for its modem business, and could still potentially sell to Apple or another firm, Journal sources said. Analysts previously speculated about an Apple takeover.
Intel has been Apple's primary 4G modem supplier since late 2016, mostly because of the global legal battle with Qualcomm over patents, royalties, and business models. Apple and government agencies accused Qualcomm of abusing its market position to force chip buyers into patent license agreements.
It's widely suspected that Apple settled with Qualcomm partly because Intel was taking too long to develop a 5G modem. It seemed increasingly likely that Intel would miss a deadline for 2020 iPhones, never mind 2019 models, and few other companies are in a position to deliver 5G chips. 2019 iPhones will likely to continue to use Intel 4G modems.
Court evidence exposed the fact that Apple had a years-long plan to reduce its royalties to Qualcomm — one document explictly stated that it wanted to "hurt Qualcomm financially" and "put Qualcomm's licensing model at risk." The company even deliberately licensed less expensive patents to make Qualcomm's rates seem excessive — with that made public, chances of victory in the lawsuit probably became slim.
While 2020 iPhones are expected to use Qualcomm chips, Apple is believed to be working on its own modem with senior hardware VP Johny Srouji at the helm. That would offer the triple benefit of optimized hardware, better-timed development, and avoiding outsourcing costs.
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22 Comments
Ben Bajarin was rumormongering this last year, that Apple would buy Intel’s modem business. He also said Apple does half the work in “Intel’s” modem development, so Apple buying Intel’s modem assets was very possible.
Im sure others will want this tech - especially China. Apple has some leverage, since they buy CPUs from Intel, maybe negotiate a good deal on the assets/IP as well as some chip specific engineers.
good move. just the talent alone is worth the money. Modem intergrated with antenna design and custom amp will go a long way (both latency and singal strength plus battery utilization). Good to see a system house pick up components as vertical integration (the industry has been fragmented for too long, that let the components vendor such as QC to dictate progress. hopefully, it is time for change - better change in std too - wash down std by vendors, hard to see good std, such as bellcore come out nowadays... sad).
Apple should just buy all of Intel and get on with designing and building all of their chips.
If Intel not going to be in 5G smartphone modem business than worth handover to Apple. Let Apple finish the job, use 5G modem in iPhone,iPad,Macbook/Pro, etc and let Intel use finished 5G tech in rest of areas like Cars,Home hub,Enterprise. It's Win-Win.