Apple's self-developed 5G chip may fail, and the Qualcomm tax can be put away again. what do you think?

Although both Apple and Qualcomm are American technology companies, they can be said to have both cooperation and competition. Apple has business dealings with Qualcomm because of its mobile communication and data terminal business; Qualcomm is the leader of mobile communication and data industry, and has professional barriers that communication enterprises can't avoid. For example, Apple relies heavily on Qualcomm for 5G baseband.

Since Qualcomm does not manufacture final products such as mobile phones, it does not need to cross-license with other enterprises, so companies that manufacture communication products must pay royalties to Qualcomm, including Huawei. However, the huge patent fees charged by Qualcomm to Apple once disgusted Apple. In order to reduce its dependence on Qualcomm, Apple hopes to develop its own 5G baseband.

Earlier, some media broke the news that Apple will release its own 5G baseband in 2022 and use it in its A-series SoC in 2023. From 20 10 to 20 16, Apple paid Qualcomm a chip purchase fee of 16 10 billion dollars and a patent licensing fee of 7.23 billion dollars. Although the money is not much for Apple, Apple has always wanted to take the initiative in its own hands.

Therefore, self-developed 5G baseband chips have become Apple's choice. Apple is not Huawei, and there is no crisis of supply interruption. For it, the main purpose of self-developed chips is to have stronger control over cost and quality. Of course, there are patent barriers in Qualcomm, and no one can get around them. Apple has to pay patent fees for its baseband.

After the successful development of baseband, Apple's powerful chip integration capability will definitely solve the problems of heat and power consumption caused by external baseband, and the battery life of iPhone will be further increased. Regrettably, some media broke the news today that Apple's research and development of the iPhone 5G baseband chip may have failed. Therefore, Qualcomm will continue to be the exclusive supplier of new iPhone 5G chips in 2023, with a supply share of 100% (previously estimated by Qualcomm as 20%).

Baseband design is not a technical problem in essence, but a commercial problem and a patent problem. Apple is a technology company with deep technology precipitation. Why did you lose on the 5G baseband chip? In fact, it is not difficult to understand that Apple is not a traditional communication equipment company, but a digital entertainment company with process design, software ecology and entertainment business as its core.

The communication system itself is very complicated. On the one hand, if a new baseband chip is to be commercialized, the field test of a typical global network is inevitable, which takes a long time and some luck. Since Apple's chips can't replace Qualcomm at present, Qualcomm's revenue and profit in the second half of 2023 and the first half of 2024 will exceed market expectations.