Not only that! but if they did sell a phone without a Qualcomm chip they lost out on ‘rebates’ that kept the prices of the modem reasonable. It would have cost apple over half a billion dollars to sell a non Qualcomm equipped phone at one point.
I mean, there is a lot more, and it’s all amazingly anti competitive. I can’t see the majority of the ruling not being upheld.
Yeah, that’s the sort of anticompetitive behavior that cost Microsoft dearly back in the 90s.
Yep I was going to mention that they look specifically like they were using Microsoft’s playbook from exactly when they got smashed by the lawsuits.
I used to work in cellular infrastructure and (at least at the time) there was just no comparison to other options (even our own). They were just ahead of everyone.
I mean, that is normal and Qualcomm is only one of the companies doing it. I won’t make any argument that they are charging fair/reasonable fees, but the fact that they are charging patent fees is absolutely standard:
Nokia on Wednesday announced a flat, 3 euro ($3.48) per-device licensing fee for its 5G standards-essential patents, according to VentureBeat . That contrasts with Ericsson, which is charging on a sliding scale between $2.50 and $5 based on the cost of a device.
Qualcomm, however, is licensing its 5G patents at 2.275 percent of a single-mode phone’s total price, and 3.25 percent for multi-mode phones, albeit with a $400 price cap.
A modern smartphone could potentially be saddled with over $21 in combined royalty payments. Around $13 will go to Qualcomm regardless of any current spats.
Meh. When we’re talking about these particular companies, it all Hitler vs.Stalin, anyway. Apple would still overcharge even if Qualcomm were selling their chips at a fair price.
It isn’t about how much they charge or overcharge. Apple doesn’t have an effective monopoly to leverage, Qualcomm does.
To think they once were known for their Eudora email client.
What does a Qualcomm-hole look like, anyway? Or smell like? And is it 7nm wide extended, or 14nm, or what?
As far as I know, this makes Qualcomm the only non-Apple choice for high-end Android devices. So suck it up, it’s Qualcomm or nuttin’.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15061/samsung-to-cease-custom-cpu-development
They’re not stopping development of SOCs, it’s just that they’ll use vanilla or lightly customized ARM designs for the CPU from now on. There’s no particular reason to believe that Samsung’s designs would be better than ARM’s. (And in fact both Samsung and Qualcomm have used ARM designs rather than custom ones in recent memory.)
Yes in the US. They used Exynos SoCs in Europe.
Samsung was trying to follow Apple in licensing ARM’s instruction set and designing their own custom chips to execute it. That’s what they’re giving up on; instead now they’ll just integrate ARM designs.
It’s easy to say Qualcomm does a terrible job when Apple beats them so handily, but it’s not so easy to replicate Apple’s success.
Some of the existing Exynos SOCs used a Cortex-Awhatever CPU rather than anything designed by Samsung. Likewise some of the existing Snapdragon SOCs used a Cortex design from ARM rather than a Krait or Kryo etc CPU designed by Qualcomm.
This will not mean any reduction in the number of high end CPUs for Android. Samsung’s own designs were not really much better or worse than what they can license from ARM.
This is one less competitor in the market, and that’s bad. Samsung’s designs weren’t great, and neither are Qualcomm’s (thus the Fuck Qualcomm title thread).
:’(
If this thread has taught me anything, that doesn’t matter.
The SE is a potential game-changer in the $400 phone market. Putting in their latest and greatest CPU was a bold move for Apple.
Yeah, I’m shocked they didn’t give it a CPU at least one generation old. The $800 iPad Pro uses an old CPU and it just came out too.
Excuse the dumb question, but why don’t Android manufacturers move to Arm? Is it a lot more expensive? Android doesn’t work with it?