cloudmobile

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  • Apple's bitter dispute with Qualcomm not expected to be resolved anytime soon

    brucemc said:
    "Apple alleges Qualcomm abuses its "monopoly power" of the mobile wireless chip market to skirt fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) patent commitments to charge customers exorbitant royalty rates." Android devices that have that same Qualcomm LTE tech in it costs as little as $120, and by this I mean LTE-enabled devices from name-brand companies like LG, Motorola, and Samsung that have the Qualcomm CPU in addition to the Qualcomm modem. Or, which is more likely in the case of Samsung LTE tablets - use their own Exynos SOC and modems for which they have to license the standards from Qualcomm. Finally, check Qualcomm's revenues. They are less than $25 billion a year. And they made a lot of stuff - networking equipment, satellite equipment, software and services - in addition to making and licensing modems and CPUs. Considering that Apple sells 250 million smartphones a year, there is no way that Apple is paying Qualcomm very much per device. Remember: Samsung sells like 350 million smartphones a year, and most of those are with Qualcomm CPUs AND modems. In fact, nearly all of the 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year have Qualcomm tech, or has tech that was licensed from Qualcomm, particularly if MediaTek (the manufacturer for the hardware used in nearly all the cheap Chinese and Indian mobile devices) has to pay Qualcomm royalties too, and I would imagine that they do. (The MediaTek chips are cheaper than the Intel ones .. but the Intel ones are much better.) So Apple isn't paying Qualcomm a whole lot. $1 billion a year sounds like a ton, but works out to about $4 an iPhone in return for 2G/3G/LTE capability. By contrast, Apple demanded that Samsung pay them licensing fees of $50 per device over "trade dress" stuff like rounded corners and the shape of app icons. Hopefully Qualcomm's lawyers will remind the judge of that very fact, and ask Apple to explain whether LTE capability is more important to a modern smartphone than trade dress. They would have a hard time claiming so, now that the current and upcoming iPhones look a lot more like the Samsung Galaxy S8 than they do the iPhone 3GS that Apple wanted Samsung to pay $50 a device for the privilege of making devices that looked somewhat similar to.
    You should read more closely - the $1billion was "rebates that Qualcomm withheld from Apple".  Apple was getting those rebates by agreeing to only use Qualcomm modems.  So if Apple is getting $1B in rebates, you can be damn sure Apple was paying a lot more than that.

    Perhaps you should take your nonsense and poorly researched posts elsewhere...
    Yet out of everything I stated only the $1 billion part was wrong. You are just someone who doesn't like differing opinions. But I would like to hear your opinion over Apple demanding $50 per device from Samsung because of rounded corners and icon shapes in comparison to what Qualcomm wants for the technology that allows a smartphone to actually be a smartphone in the first place. You could pack all the horsepower in the Ax chips that you want, and it wouldn't be much good if your data connection was limited to 1G analog signals would it? And by the way ... Apple was sued for patent infringement over their ARM designs for the Ax chips by the University of Wisconsin ... and lost and had to pay up big. So yeah, I guess that is why you would rather I comment elsewhere, right?