In July last year, Apple announced that it would acquire most of Intel's smartphone baseband chips for $654.38 billion. In February, the transaction between the two parties was successful. After the transaction, Apple obtained patents spanning 65,438+07,000 skills, and about 2,200 Intel employees will join Banana Apple, which really shows that Banana Apple hopes to greatly reduce its dependence on Qualcomm. There are various previews in iPhone 12, and Apple also used Qualcomm's baseband chip when it died. However, due to the protracted patent war between the two parties, Apple stopped using Qualcomm baseband and switched to Intel baseband.
In 20 19, Apple made peace with Qualcomm, and both parties agreed to give Qualcomm a one-time handshake developed by Apple. These two stores have only been authorized for six years, which serves as a foil for tens of millions of iPhone 12 families to exercise Qualcomm baseband again. Although Srouji only glanced at such a plan, he never revealed when Apple's self-developed baseband chip could not be shipped. After the briefing, Qualcomm's share price has dropped by 5% after Thursday's close. In addition to Qualcomm, Broadcom, Qorvo and Skyworks Solutions, another supplier of RF chips from Apple, were also depressed, with the declines of 1%, 3.59% and 4.33% respectively. Investors are worried that since RF chips and baseband chips need close cooperation, if Apple abandons Qualcomm, these RF chip suppliers will be abolished, which has great box office value.
Apple's research and development strength is underestimated, and M 1 chip is the most prominent example. But for this baseband chip, Apple has a long way to go before it can replace Qualcomm in pairs. Network operators around the world have different ways to equip large-scale networks, use different signal frequency bands, and the regulatory networks are incomparable. Qualcomm set up laboratories everywhere at sea to describe the real environment of each team and adjust it. The close partners with the four operators have been growing up from small to large, all of which have changed their strong boundaries and let strangers get in the way.