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How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

arstechnica.com

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Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#101

Post by tooltalk »

mbreese wrote: post #91
aey wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Qualcomm strangled RIM with their 3.4% (peak!) licensing fee on the selling price of the phone. If RIMs profit margin was 3.5% they had bigger problems. Here is the thing. If Apple sold a 2G network based iPhone with a non Qualcomm IP modem, and a 4G iPhone at 2x the price with a Qualcomm modem, which one would make more money for Apple?

Why should the price of the phone matter to Qualcomm? Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery?

> Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery?

Sure, without QCOM's IP, other non-wireless parts of the phone won't add/contribute as much value or drive market demand for the phone.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#102

Post by village-idiot »

dragonwriter wrote: post #95
village-idiot wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the market isn’t iOS devices, the market is smart phones. And in that market Apple does not have a monopoly. If you start declaring that the market is the specific store or product, then literally every single product and service is a monopoly begging for state intervention. Can I sue Netflix because as the monopoly holder of the Netflix network they refuse to carry my home made videos? Is Spotify abusing their m…

The market is what products people actually move to and from in response to Apple pricw changes; if there's a segment of buyers and price range in which Apple has pricing power—price changes do not cause such movement—Apple is an antitrust monopoly. Popular descriptive “markets” like “smartphones” often include many isolated submarkets and are not single markets in which competition exists. A major purpose of brnad m…

So your point is that there are no high priced smart phones other than Apple, therefore it’s a monopoly?

Aside from being extremely silly, under this formulation Rolls Royce might be a monopoly, it lacks factual backing. There are plenty of android offerings that overlap Apple offerings in price, including the Pixel 3 and most of the Galaxy S10 series. If your point is that someone willing to spend $1k on a smart phone has no other choice other than to buy Apple, the $1k+ Galaxy S10+ would like to have a word with you.

If your point instead is that any brand that builds up a “pocket market” via good products and marketing is an abusive monopoly that just be stopped, then you’re signing up basically every top company in the every market segment for stringent antitrust enforcement, which is so broad a definition as to be useless. You can’t sue Nike as a monopoly because they’ve built up their own fan base and “pocket market”.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#103

Post by photojosh »

protomyth wrote: post #58
pier25 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK Apple designs and manufactures its SOCs but keeps using ARM designed CPUs. Not sure about the GPUs though. Edit: Protomyth below is correct. Apple licenses the architecture from ARM but designs its custom chips. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-arm-designs-help-samsu... The chips themselves are manufactured by TSMC.

I am pretty sure the A-series is not an ARM supplied core these days.

Yep, they were using ARM cores up until the A5 (iPhone 4S, ARM Cortex-A9), then a custom core for the A6, and then... have people forgotten how the A7 came out of nowhere with its custom 64-bit core and completely blew away the rest of the industry with its performance?

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#104

Post by Analemma_ »

tooltalk wrote: post #101
mbreese wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the price of the phone matter to Qualcomm? Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery?

> Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery? Sure, without QCOM's IP, other non-wireless parts of the phone won't add/contribute as much value or drive market demand for the phone.

But they're adding a fixed amount of value regardless of the phone, and so they should get a fixed sum per phone. This business where they get a percentage of the retail price is ridiculous.

Consider the 64 GB iPhone XS selling for $1000 vs the 512 GB one for $1349. Is Qualcomm adding any extra value to the second phone as compared to the first one? Obviously not, so why should they capture any of the extra purchase price?

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#105

Post by Retric »

tooltalk wrote: post #101
mbreese wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the price of the phone matter to Qualcomm? Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery?

> Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery? Sure, without QCOM's IP, other non-wireless parts of the phone won't add/contribute as much value or drive market demand for the phone.

Ehh, the original cellphone patents had already expired at that point. QCOM’s IP had arguable direct value only representing improvements to existing tech.

Their business model existed largely via the mismatch between cellphone companies and wireless carriers.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#106

Post by tooltalk »

closetohome wrote: post #96
henryfjordan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think things are as clear cut as you make them out to be. Apple says nobody can run apps on their phone without handing them a 30% cut. No side-loading, no other stores, nothing. There is very obviously a market for apps that Apple controls completely. Just because there are other app stores for other phones does not mean Apple doesn't have control over the entire market for iPhone apps. Markets can be narrow…

> Markets can be narrowly defined in anti-trust law I doubt one has ever been defined as narrowly as a single product. The differences between an iPhone and an Android phone are functionally so minimal as to be irrelevant.

>I doubt one has ever been defined as narrowly as a single product.

Actually, QCOM's antitrust case is exactly that: QCOM's dominance in one or two particular markets (or product), in this case, the CDMA and "premium" (aka, LTE) modems.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#107

Post by village-idiot »

sigstoat wrote: post #50
village-idiot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s factually false. You can side load apps, plenty of enterprises do it.

last i looked that requires a couple hundred dollar per year special developer account from apple, with special checks to make sure you're actually a business doing it for business reasons. and they still sign your apps, they just do it automatically, i think.

So? You can still side load. Developers do it all the time. The approval process is only for distributing your private app to hundreds of people using Apple’s servers and hardware.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#108

Post by blunte »

I find great irony in Qualcomm exercising a monopoly position to take a % of total phone price from Apple... since Apple uses its monopoly position to take a % of all app revenue.

What Apple thinks would be fair for Qualcomm chip license fees would also be reasonable for App Store fees.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#109

Post by henryfjordan »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #98
henryfjordan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think things are as clear cut as you make them out to be. Apple says nobody can run apps on their phone without handing them a 30% cut. No side-loading, no other stores, nothing. There is very obviously a market for apps that Apple controls completely. Just because there are other app stores for other phones does not mean Apple doesn't have control over the entire market for iPhone apps. Markets can be narrow…

>Apple says nobody can run apps on their phone without handing them a 30% cut. False. You can pay for an app/service via the internet (side-pay). The app can be free on the app store. This is what Netflix does. Is it a bit of a hassle? Sure. This is the only part that has an optics problem even though it probably meets any legal thresholds. I do think Apple will get some pressure to make this process easier and that…

> From the consumer perspective, if one doesn't like the app store, buy a different brand of phone. There is no monopoly here from a legal or functional perspective.

That is not how monopolies are defined. Apple says all apps for the iPhone must be signed by them and they must collect 30% of sales and in-app-purchases. The fact that they run an "App Store" means there is a market for iPhone apps. They control the market for iPhone apps. I don't know how to make that any clearer. The fact that Android exists does not change anything about the market for iPhone apps.

However, side-pay will be a very interesting defense. I haven't really considered that enough to speak on it.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#110

Post by henryfjordan »

closetohome wrote: post #94
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s like complaining that IKEA has a monopoly within IKEA stores. I feel like the fact that only Apple makes iOS devices is what's confusing people. Suppose that Tesla is the only company that makes electric cars and also the only company that has any electric car charging ports. (This is a hypothetical; in practice other companies offer both electric cars and charging ports.) They don't have a monopoly on cars…

So your argument is that only Apple can make an app store? I feel like Google might disagree.

Only Apple can make an iPhone app store, which is the market they are alleged to have monopolized
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