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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

#301

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Anarch157a wrote: post #148
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…

The problem with your argument is that electricity is fungible and it's wide available. When you buy you Nissan Leaf, you don't need Tesla's charging ports, you can plug it on any power outlet. You might miss the fast charging, but that's it. When you go buy a phone, one of the factors you have to decide is "what app store do I want". If you go with Android, you might miss a few apps, but so what ? Most of them are a…

> The problem with your argument is that electricity is fungible and it's wide available. When you buy you Nissan Leaf, you don't need Tesla's charging ports, you can plug it on any power outlet. You might miss the fast charging, but that's it.

You're explaining why Tesla doesn't have a charging port monopoly in practice. The hypothetical is that they do. You can't use any other power outlet in the same way that you can't install an Android app on an iPhone.

> When you go buy a phone, one of the factors you have to decide is "what app store do I want".

Which is what creates the app store monopoly. There wouldn't be one if you could make that decision independently, which is the whole point. It's classic tying.

Moreover, the "customer" of the app store is as much the developer as the user, given that they're the ones paying all the fees. But they don't get to choose between platforms any more than Walmart chooses to operate in Florida instead of California, because they have to reach their customers in both regions, not just one or the other.

By contrast, Nike can choose Target instead of Walmart because they both operate in both regions, so they can still reach substantially all of their customers through one store if the other is being unreasonable, since it's much easier for the customer to switch stores for a desired product when that doesn't require switching locations/platforms at the same time.

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

#302

Post by systemBuilder »

calyth2018 wrote: post #284
oarla wrote: post #195

This article makes it sound like Apple and Intel and poor victims of Qualcomm's bullying. That is hardly the case. Both are much bigger than Qualcomm, and have been bullies in their own way. Funny to see them cry wolf

Try working at say LG, HTC, BlackBerry, anyone that wasn't top dog in their ecosystem. You pay Qualcomm a lot of money just to get access to the modems, but they'll ignore you for bug fixes, firmware, etc... The word Qualcomm drop (update in the Qualcomm code) sent a shiver down my spine. They'd fix one bug and introduce two others, that is if the bug big enough that they couldn't simply ignore you in the first place…

This is more or less totally false more than any other hardware vendor Qualcomm delivers working phones to its chipset customers so that they can copy and modify the designs and so that they succeed it's the failure of Intel to provide a well-integrated working product to customers that made them flop. Qualcomm provides demo phones and schematics for every generation of chipset.

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

#303

Post by systemBuilder »

Epopeehief54 wrote: post #300

From everything I hear from him, Judge Koh is consistently one of the better judges I have seen in some time.

I don't think so at least if you look at the background of this journalist he writes 100% hit pieces on the tech world. 100% hit pieces.

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

#304

Post by systemBuilder »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #242

"Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips." Wow, shocking. I'm surprised Jobs didn't gather a forum of all the handset makers to work as a cabal against QQcom on the issue.

Apple is a monopolist and now that the worldwide market for cell phones is shrinking it hates the thought that it is the highest-cost producer dependent on another monopolist. Qualcomm charges effectively a 4-5% VAT on the end-user price of a product. Qualcomm wanted to give the little guys a break. I worked on radio systems design and my wife worked directly for Irwin Jacobs. The big monopolist just fakring hates that the little guys have a chance. It's why you see Apple screaming louder than everybody ...

Apple is struggling to raise prices in everything they do these days. They invented the $1,500 phone. They make phones that more and more cannot be disassembled. They started soldering everything to the motherboards (phones, MacBooks). They now put lock down chips in the phone and the laptop so most of the hardware cannot be swapped out and repaired. They charge $500 to replace the back of a phone when Samsung charges $20. They make defective failure-prone keyboards and keep selling them 3 years after the market began complaining. They took out functionality and raised prices with USB C.

We are actually close to "peak apple" if you think about it for just 10 seconds. Growth under Tim Cook (mid-2012 to now) has been one third of growth under Steve Jobs (mid 2007-mid 2012).

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

#306

Post by farahday »

yaantc wrote: post #227
farahday wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can one take a look at those specs? Are there RFC like things available?

Here's the landing point I use: https://www.3gpp.org/specifications/specification-numbering In particular, serie 36 is for the LTE RAN (radio access network) while series 38 is for the NR (~5G) RAN. But other series are relevant, for the core and services parts among (many) other things. All the specs are publicly accessible, and also the change requests (CR) submitted for discussion at the standardization meetings,…

Thanks for the great info.

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

#307

Post by sangnoir »

nasut wrote: post #299
sangnoir wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Apple did to/with that glass foundry that went under was straight-up gangster.

And because of that the little glass (actually sapphire) company´s execs are in court for fraud and the little glass company Apple raised from obscurity (Gorilla) is doing pretty well - Right. Gangster

I might be missing your sarcasm (as they are not 'little'), but are you suggesting that Apple raised the 168 year old, S&P 500 Corning Glass from obscurity?

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

#308

Post by ncmncm »

braythwayt wrote: post #280
ncmncm wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the diæresis: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-... The "æ" is a whole nother thing.

I was taught about the diaeresis way back in the 1970s in high school English. But I didn’t embrace it until the late 80s when I started writing with a Macintosh, and read “The Mac is Not a Typewriter,” a great little book. I've always liked typography and graphic design, and I enjoy anachronisms like ligatures, alternate letterforms, drop capitals, visual justification, latin phrases, and so on ad nauseum.

ad nause-am.

I am particularly fond of the looped st and sc ligatures.

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

#309

Post by knd775 »

ncmncm wrote: post #263
knd775 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there is that one company that keeps claiming that they own C++ and keeps trying to sue people for using it.

Oh? Please expand.

Sorry for the late response. A company named SCO claims they own the language. They obviously don't (possibly just a specific compiler), but they still try (or tried for a while) to charge licensing fees. I'm having a hard time finding references to this now, but here are two links that talk a bit about it:

https://lwn.net/Articles/39227/

http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#revenues

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

#310

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