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.
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 parity in their own pipeline even if it’s more expensive, it’s a good option to have on the back burner.
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.
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
It’s absolutely clickbaot IMO. The phrasing alone gives it away. Regardless, there was massive garbage rumors and hate when it was leaked that Apple was making their own chip for macOS. The M-series chips have been phenomenal, which might be their own enemy in this case by setting the expectations too high. You’re definitely right about the long term implications though, if I was an investor, I would take this as a net positive to hold.
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.
Nah, the WSJ is Rupert Murdoch’s blog, they’re not there to make money.
And it’s lemmy, of course I didn’t RTFA.
Ever since antenna gate, the reality distortion field around Apple has gone both ways it seems. Nothing around the company seems to be reported reasonably and it’s pretty boring and exhausting.
Seems pretty common nowadays, with internet articles going for maximum clickbait, I would have hoped the Wall Street journal would be above that, that apparently not.
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.
I heard somewhere they ran into tons of patent issues
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Highly recommend reading daringfireball.net’s takedown of this nonsense
Link?
Original article https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-iphone-modem-chip-failure-6fe33d19
Archive link https://archive.ph/i7KtJ
Qualcomm be like:
