Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens Alejandro86 and soft media users 1520111 for their clue delivery! CTOnews.com, September 21 (Xinhua) over the past few years, Apple has spent billions of dollars trying to develop its own modem chip to replace the Qualcomm modem chip it uses in the iPhone, but the latest report in the Wall Street Journal says Apple has unrealistic goals for the project, a lack of understanding of the challenges involved, and that its prototype is completely unusable.

Apple hired thousands of engineers to design its own internal modems: Apple acquired most of Intel's smartphone modem business in 2019 and filled the project team with Intel engineers and others hired from Qualcomm. Company executives set a goal to launch their own modem chip in the fall of 2023. The modem chip project is codenamed "Sinope", named after the fairy who outwitted Zeus in Greek mythology.

However, "many wireless experts in the project soon realized that it was impossible to achieve the goal," the report said.

Former Apple engineers and executives familiar with the project said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the obstacles to completing the chip were "mainly caused by Apple itself". The team working on the project is "weighed down by technical challenges, poor communication and management disagreements over the wisdom of trying to design chips rather than buying them".

The report says:

Apple had planned to prepare its modem chip for use in the new iPhone model. But tests at the end of last year found that the chip was too slow and easy to overheat. The circuit board is too big to use because it has half an iPhone.

The team is scattered among different groups in the United States and overseas, without a global leader. Some managers discourage engineers from conveying bad news about delays or setbacks, resulting in unrealistic goals and missed deadlines.

"just because Apple makes the best chips on earth, it's absurd to think that they can also make modems," said Jaydeep Ranade, a former Apple wireless executive. He left the company in 2018, the year the project began.

Apple is reported to be able to design its own microprocessors for iPhone and iPad, which makes the company think it can make modem chips. However, such chips need to send and receive wireless data from various types of wireless networks and must comply with strict connection standards to serve wireless operators around the world, making it a more challenging task.

According to reports, after Apple tested its prototype modems at the end of last year, the test results were not satisfactory. According to people familiar with the tests interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, these chips are "basically three years behind Qualcomm's best modem chips." using them could slow the wireless speed of the iPhone than its competitors.

So Apple was forced to settle with Qualcomm and then used Qualcomm's 5G modem chip in its latest iPhone and iPad series. As things stand, the technology may not finally reach a level high enough for Apple to phase out Qualcomm until 2025 at the earliest, according to the sources of the report.

"these delays show that Apple did not anticipate the complexity of the work," Serge Willenegger, a longtime Qualcomm executive, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

CTOnews.com noted that Apple last week extended its agreement to obtain a modem from Qualcomm for another three years, highlighting the severity of Apple's setback.

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