‘Apple puts development of its own WiFi chips on the back burner’ – Tablets and telephones – News

It seems more like a business economic story to me.

Apple sued Qualcomm at the time, because Apple could not grow much in terms of profit with their hardware, so it had to cut costs. First, Intel was kicked out in the CPU area.

Due to Intel’s failure to make a 4G modem, the last option was to sue Qualcomm with patent gossip and hopefully reach a settlement that would allow Apple to pay Qualcomm less. That failed miserably and Apple was embarrassed. At Qualcomm, thousands of bright minds have worked for years on 4 and later 5G. So no silly design with a rubber band effect or a rectangle with rounded corners that Apple is used to in terms of innovation, but just 1000 expensive physics engineers and tests in the field with mountains, how people hold a phone and so on. Both at Intel and later at Apple it turned out that copying this from Qualcomm was a lot more difficult than Apple had hoped. Especially in terms of power consumption, Intel did not manage to do it, and that is a chip company.

So Apple started working to cut back on WiFi chips, because the share price is falling. Apple’s threat alone to do so probably forced lower prices at Broadcom. Because Broadcom is easily dependent on Apple for >20% of its turnover.

But now, for the first time in a very long time, it seems that the smartphone market is about to shrink. iPhones also last quite a long time. Energy costs are rising, customers have less money for an expensive telephone.

3nm is about the first process where the cost per transistor no longer decreases. TSMC also raises prices, possibly not for Apple but for all ‘looser’ customers (Qualcomm, NVidia presumably). Apple is trapped like a rat at TSMC, because the Samsung foundry has killed them themselves in terms of leadership in the technical field. That because Steve Jobs wanted everything away from Samsung because, in his opinion, Samsung had copied the iPhone. There is something to be said for that, but indirectly killing Samsung Foundry was strategically the dumbest choice ever. Apple is now 100% dependent on TSMC.

So apparently we have to cut costs in a different way; because TSMC and Qualcomm are not an option in terms of cuts. Broadcom probably made a good offer to Apple, an offer they can’t refuse. For the stage it must look a bit like Apple is still working on it, its own WiFi chip. But probably, just like recently at Intel, Microsoft and Facebook, some people will really be allowed to look for other work.

As with Broadcom, the chips were probably offered to Apple so cheaply that Broadcom now also has to cut costs considerably.