alt Hacker NewsApple leans its weight heavily on controversial smartphone changes and defines trends for the rest of the industry, even when it's not the first company to do so. When it removed the headphone jack, introduced the screen notch, or added a camera bump, everyone followed afterward despite the grumbling.
So keeping that in mind, regarding the modem, I remember prior comments about it being near-impossible or extremely difficult for Apple to cut out Qualcomm because of the decentralized network of mobile towers, operators, proprietary information, legacy cruft, edge cases, hardware and geographical testing, etc., which Qualcomm handles as part of its value-add. If Apple starts spearheading changes in how phone modems work, could we imagine mobile towers playing along and converging? Or is it more entrenched than that?
Prior discussion
Replies
I don't think anyone thought it was literally impossible, just really, really hard and with a ton of corner cases and micro-optimizations necessary. But remember, they've been at this for a long time now: they bought Intel's modem business in 2019 and Intel presumably had several years worth of work on it before that. I guess this is the year when they've ground out enough of the bugs to at least ship it on a non-flagship device.
>If Apple starts spearheading changes in how phone modems work, could we imagine mobile towers playing along and converging? Or is it more entrenched than that?
Do You mean Telco Equipment vendor converging? Well first thing is that 4g / 5G or 3GPP is an open standard so anyone could implement it. Second is that there are only a few Telco Equipment vendor left already. There will still be insane amount of testing required to be done even if everyone were to use the same equipment. The amount of variables such as spectrum, regulations requirements, physical space and density as well as weather difference.
> extremely difficult for Apple to cut out Qualcomm
4G and above are open standards, and Samsung, Huawei and MediaTek have all previously created their own cellular modem implementations.
It's not easy, but if your market share is big enough, you come out ahead.
Unfortunately, the worst example they set is the locked-down device + an app store.
Not seeing examples of comments claiming it being "near-impossible" in your linked discussion. Most of those comments are just grumbling about eSIMs.
The other phonemakers didn't grumble about the jack because they realized they could pull the same scam
> extremely difficult for Apple to cut out Qualcomm
it was extremely difficult, they have been working on this since at least ~6 years, maybe longer and involved buying intel 5G modem business
it also is lacking UWB which either Apple has given up on or is bringing back with future revisions of their modem