Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 314 posts

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

#121

Post by incompatible »

aey wrote: post #115
Retric wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, my point exactly. All the recent IP covers improvements since 2G. Apple can try to sell a 2G network connected iPhone based on expired IP without the Qualcomm tax. Free market pricing is based on demand of the feature not the cost to make it. Qualcomm should be pricing the part at the point where the phone without the qualcomm part is equal value per dollar.

If a monopolist (or dominant oligopolist) charges too much, it would encourage competitors, at least if they don't have a stranglehold through patents. There may be a sweet spot where the "free market" allows them to remain a monopolist.

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

#122

Post by forrestthewoods »

aey wrote: post #112
Analemma_ wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, because the value of the 512gb without the qualcomm modem is lower than the 64GB version. Free market pricing is based on demand of the feature not the cost to make it. Qualcomm should be pricing the part at the point where the phone without the qualcomm part is equal value per dollar.

I’m pro patent and copyright law. But they are, by strict definition, government sanctioned monopolies. There ain’t nothing free market about this licensing situation.

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

#123

Post by zelon88 »

kyrra wrote: post #120
sriram_sun wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know one person who works in that team. Said he was driving to lunch and heard the news that Apple and Qualcomm had reached a deal. So he buys a few Qualcomm shares (he sold them at peak!), gets back to work and then this e-mail shows up saying Intel is getting out of the 5G modem business. I'm paraphrasing here: "The sight of a whole floor of heads popping up from their cubes at the same time... what an experience…

My bet is that Apple buys Intel's modem parents and hires most of the staff from Intel that was doing modem chips. Apple already has a team that is likely working on this. https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/03/apple-modem-iphone-intel/

Why would Intel sell that though?

Selling toast isn't easy when you let the customer borrow your bread and butter.

To put it another way, Apple took their ball and went home. No soup for them!

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

#124

Post by aspenmayer »

tareqak wrote: post #70
bsder wrote: post #46

Is Qualcomm a ruthless monopolist? Yep. But what people forget is that EVERYBODY was knifing one another in that space when CDMA originally came out. The only difference is that Qualcomm is the ruthless monopolist that won. In addition, while I have no love lost for Qualcomm, what you do have to remember is that CDMA was a "bet the farm" moment. If CDMA could be delivered, it was significantly better than what existe…

What other corporation requires paying to license their patent portfolio in order to be allowed buy their products? I don't have to pay for a license from McDonald's to eat their burger. I'm not an expert in this domain, so there might be more relevant example. Update: fixed up my wording.

You do have to agree to the McDonald's app terms and conditions so you can get its benefits, like skipping the line. You pay twice: first, with money; then, with data.

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

#125

Post by amluto »

aey wrote: post #86
guardiangod wrote: post #19

As a former worker at Blackberry(RIM) cellular chip division (hello fellow RCT-ees), this article explains so much it physically hurts me. RIM pushed hard to develop its own chip 3G/4G chips because Qualcomm absolutely strangled the company with its licensing cost/terms. They pretty much demanded a separate cellular R&D team (QCT) that duplicates half the effort. All CDMA based phones must contain chips from QCT beca…

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?

I suspect that the fact that those were the only choices is a result of Qualcomm’s abusive licensing.

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

#126

Post by acdha »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #117
mschuster91 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio? Workable maybe but not power efficient, which is crucial in mobile. That takes years to figure out and is the reason why ARM is so utterly dominant on mobile - there simply is not any Intel x86 offering even close to the power envelope of ARM, even after years of ARM…

Intel could probably do it if they had the luxury of redesigning their instruction set. They're stuck with supporting an overly CISC-based instruction set whose roots date back to the early 1970s. ARM didn't have that problem and designed a much more modern RISC-like instruction set which requires a lot less power.

This argument has held progressively less weight since 1995, when Intel released the Pentium Pro and started the precedent of deciding x86 CISC instructions into the micro-ops which are actually executed. ARM is a respectable architecture and Apple has shipped some very competitive chips but it’s not like Intel’s engineers have been in a coma for forty years.

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

#127

Post by MrMorden »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #73
protomyth wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After reading about it particularly "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry", I think guardiangod is correct, but also Verizon and, to a much lesser extent, the whole stock dating scandal. If Verizon hadn't been so gun-ho for an iPhone killer, Blackberry would probably of got to something like the Passport a whole lot faster. They needed to stay in their l…

The Passport was a phenomenal device, and nothing like it has been built since. Large square screen and big touch sensitive keyboard, but yet still super manageable due to its squat height... if there was a modern Android version I'd go for it in a heartbeat. Not great for watching videos, but it would be super for everything else.

The problem with the Passport was that it didn't have the Google store. 95% of developers couldn't be bothered to submit their applications to Amazon.

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

#128

Post by phonon »

Analemma_ wrote: post #104
tooltalk wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

At least for the license with Apple, it was capped at the first $400 of the phone. I.e. it was a flat rate for virtually all iPhones.[0]

For the industry at large it was $500 (now $400) [1]

https://fudzilla.com/news/mobile/47691-apple-qualcomm-licens... [0]

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-qualcomm-licensing/qualco... [1]

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

#129

Post by zaroth »

blunte wrote: post #108

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.

Apple doesn’t get a percent cut of Android app sales.

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

#130

Post by tareqak »

aspenmayer wrote: post #124
tareqak wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other corporation requires paying to license their patent portfolio in order to be allowed buy their products? I don't have to pay for a license from McDonald's to eat their burger. I'm not an expert in this domain, so there might be more relevant example. Update: fixed up my wording.

You do have to agree to the McDonald's app terms and conditions so you can get its benefits, like skipping the line. You pay twice: first, with money; then, with data.

You're paying to skip the line using data, but you're not paying for the meal with data. If you could only purchase the meal using the app, then you could make the argument that some part of the meal price could be paid from the data itself. I don't know if there are vending machines that will only sell if you have the relevant app installed first, but I think those come closer.

However, unless the terms of service of any of those approaches penalized me for buying a meal at Burger King, then we aren't quite at the same level of scrutiny as opposed to what was reported to have happened in this article.

Post reply on HN