Well-known analyst Ming-Chi Kuo revealed in an investor report:
When iPhone 11 was released in September 2019, as before, Apple was still at the back of the network technology team and was It is not equipped with a 5G chip.
Cook explained:
Apple’s extremely profit-seeking judgment does not seem to be wrong. 5G smartphones did not start selling well until a year later. Sales of Apple's iPhone 11 series have been good since its release. Recently affected by the chip shortage, there are faint signs of decline, and it has topped the sales of various platforms for several consecutive months.
But none of this stopped Apple's decline until the emergence of the iPhone 12 series.
After the iPhone series set its highest sales record from October to December 2017, sales have been declining. But with the release of iPhone 12, this situation has completely reversed.
In Apple’s first quarter report for fiscal year 2021, revenue in Greater China alone reached US$21.313 billion, an increase of 57% over the same period last year.
At the financial report meeting, Cook said that there are more than 1.65 billion Apple devices in use around the world, and the number of active iPhone installations exceeds 1 billion. iPhone (replacement) upgrades have set a record high in China.
At this time, Apple has already changed its strategy:
Compared with Qualcomm, Samsung, and Huawei, which have already completed their layout in advance, Apple is once again at the back of the team. . But this time is different from the past. Apple wants to use its own power to get rid of the long-standing "network problem."
In 2001, 3G networks had begun to be deployed, but the iPhone six years later did not support 3G; in 2009, the first batch of 4G service providers began testing, and the iPhone 5 appeared three years later; < /p>
This time, although Cook did enough homework on the iPhone 11 that "5G is temporarily useless", he launched the iPhone 12 equipped with 5G a year later.
Apple's lateness in the Internet is not entirely due to strategy, but a "weakness."
In April, Apple announced its financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2021 as of March 27, 2021. Among them, net profit was US$23.63 billion, a 110% increase from US$11.249 billion in the same period last year, far exceeding market expectations.
It is no exaggeration to say that it is one of the most profitable companies in the world. But even if you have a lot of money, you still can't get rid of this "weakness". The American giant Intel gave up the research and development of 5G baseband chips, and packaged the R&D team and results and sold them to Apple. However, in addition to spending money, Apple still cannot get rid of the technical difficulties and protocol barriers of baseband chips in a short period of time.
Currently, Huawei is probably the only company in the world that can formulate communication technology standard protocols and support core high-performance baseband chips. In order to get rid of Qualcomm, Apple has also thought of many ways.
1. It has been entangled with Qualcomm over patent fees for many years, and reached a six-year cooperation memorandum in April 2019.
2. After the iPhone 7 series, Intel was introduced as a supplier and began to use a mix of Intel and Qualcomm basebands, and later abandoned Qualcomm altogether. However, the performance of Intel baseband made the subsequent iPhone series criticized, and Apple returned to Qualcomm baseband.
It now seems that the reason why the iPhone 11 series has not caught up with the 5G train is not entirely due to the "5G is useless" theory they say. There is another possibility: Apple cannot get the 5G baseband chip at all.
Although Qualcomm’s baseband chip is used, the signal problem has not been significantly improved. Not long after the iPhone 12 series products were sold, a large number of consumers reported poor signal problems on Apple communities, Tieba and other social platforms. In severe cases, they even required a reboot to restore functionality.
All manufacturers in the world want to have baseband products with independent property rights, and have made many attempts. However, the number of manufacturers that have failed in this is probably the following: Texas Instruments, Marvell, Nvidia, Phase One Carl, Broadcom, ADI... these chip giants, developing chips is like drinking soup, but they have suffered a lot in baseband.
As early as 2019, Apple has acquired Intel’s smartphone baseband business. Will it have to wait until 2023 for final commercial use?
The main difficulties:
1. The concentration of patented technology makes it difficult for Apple to achieve a breakthrough in a short time;
Apple wants to engage in 5G communications Baseband is not difficult from a research and development perspective, but if it wants to be commercially available, it must be compatible with 4G, 3G, and even 2G networks.
The patents for these communication protocols are in the hands of communication operators such as Qualcomm, Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia. If you want to do it, you must reach some kind of agreement with the communication operator (patent licensing, etc.).
This is not an easy task. Huawei can do it easily because it has enough patents to achieve crossover. On the other hand, Apple, which has been in litigation with Qualcomm for many years, obviously does not have the financial resources (the Intel resources it acquired are not of the same size as Qualcomm and Huawei).
2. Equipment compatibility issues;
"Use" and "do" are two different things.
Apple’s baseband has always been supplied by Qualcomm and Intel. It is just for use. Whether it is good or bad is another matter. Once you want to do self-research, you have to consider base station equipment and other issues.
An iPhone will be used in hundreds of countries, and it may face a dozen or even more network operators. How to be compatible and how to adapt requires Apple to consider and invest one by one.
3. Experience accumulation and environmental issues;
Smartphones are different from earlier wired phones. The mobile phone connects and transmits with different base stations during the movement. During movement, or even in different environments, the loading power required is different. Product adjustment requires a large amount of actual commercial data, which Apple lacks in comparison.
Qualcomm holds a large amount of basic data, whether it is 2/3/4G or the current 5G communication patents, which are the results of its more than ten years of hard work in the field of mobile communications.
This is especially true for Huawei. From its establishment in 1987 to the current giant of communication equipment suppliers, it is conceivable that Huawei has accumulated experience and technology in the field of communication.
As the world's leading chip giant, Apple is obviously tired of the endless wrangling with Qualcomm; for Apple, which pursues high profits, the lack of baseband chips has also seriously affected revenue.
Signal problems have troubled Apple users for more than ten years, and they still have not been perfectly solved. To a large extent, it is a baseband problem. Whether Apple, which has become "obsessed" with cost control, can perfectly solve the signal problem through self-developed 5G baseband chips, depends on how much Apple attaches importance to this "core component."
I also hope that Apple will be a "reckless man" and completely cure the "signal disease" of its own products regardless of the cost.
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