By presenting its homemade chips, the apple brand hopes to gradually detach itself from the founder Qualcomm.
It is no longer a secret that Apple plans to equip its iPhones with its own modem chips in the years to come. A project which had never materialized until then, but which could well be, from 2023. According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the American brand could thus manufacture its high-end 5G processors within two years.
A forecast that would meet Qualcomm’s expectations. The founder currently equips the majority of iPhones, but plans to change his mind soon. On the occasion of Qualcomm Investor Day which was held yesterday, the financial director of the firm Akash Palkhiwala, thus estimated that only 20% of iPhone chips would be supplied by his company in 2023. A precise estimate, and which will undoubtedly be explained by the geographical restrictions linked to certain commercial regions.
Even if the founder preferred to play the card of caution, explaining that this was only a “Planning assumption for forecasting purposes”, the announcements made by Qualcomm seem concrete enough to stick to Apple’s long-standing emancipation plan. However, be careful not to go too fast: “Just to be clear, there is no new data point that requires us to make this prediction compared to our discussions in the past”, reports the company. “We just wanted to establish a basis for this forecast”.
The end of a story?
From 2023, Qualcomm should no longer be Apple’s majority supplier for SoCs. It must be said that the brand founded by Steve Jobs has already tried a few times to emancipate itself from the American founder. After a complicated legal battle between Apple and Qualcomm, the two parties finally agreed to a six-year partnership. However, the company never seems to have given up on its idea of an in-house SoC. In the summer of 2019, Apple had bought the modem division of Intel, its many patents and some of its employees, for the modest sum of $ 1 billion.
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