applecider

cloudmobile 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.