81–90 of 188 posts
“Apple had planned to have its modem chip ready to use in the new iPhone models. But tests late last year found the chip was too slow and prone to overheating. Its circuit board was so big it would take up half an iPhone, making it unusable.” How is this even possible? I mean I get it’s hard but a 3 inch modem chip? lol
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By that logic, iPads wouldn’t need a cellular variant either.
This is correct. Tethering is flaky. I was trying to tether my iPad to my iPhone just last night, eventually gave up and just read my book on my iPhone instead. If I depended on tethering for actually getting my work done I'd have an aneurism.
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This logic doesn't hold - the same is true of an iPad. To quote you, "Everyone has a phone. Why increase the BOM?" - if it's ok to include cost of a modem for an iPad, it's ok for a MacBook Pro too.
the thing is, historically, if you already make laptops (and they 20 years ago had a pcmcia slot in which a verizon, etc, cellular modem could fit...i had one), and you already later make iPhones, then it's a short jump from iPhone logic board to iPad. it's a longer jump to get a cellular capable antenna complex in an all metal (think semi faraday cage) aluminium unibody. point is, it's historical artifact originally…
Its arguably an even shorter jump between iPad and MacBook Pro today - the architecture of both products is incredibly similar now.
> it's a longer jump to get a cellular capable antenna complex in an all metal (think semi faraday cage) aluminium unibody.
You mean just like the aluminium bodies already present on the cellular iPads? Or several generations of iPhone? This excuse doesn't hold either.
Every time a new MacBook Pro is released, I check to see if they have figured out how to put a modem in it like they manage to with watches, phones, and tablets. This is an obvious example where the market is failing. The best explanation I heard is that the Apple deal with Qualcomm pays Qualcomm a royalty as a function of the price of the device and Apple does not want to give that much money to Qualcomm and/or rais…
There have been leaked prototypes with integrated cellular, FWIW: https://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/14/photos-of-a-prototype-m...
Every time a new MacBook Pro is released, I check to see if they have figured out how to put a modem in it like they manage to with watches, phones, and tablets. This is an obvious example where the market is failing. The best explanation I heard is that the Apple deal with Qualcomm pays Qualcomm a royalty as a function of the price of the device and Apple does not want to give that much money to Qualcomm and/or rais…
I have to imagine part of this is how expensive data in US still is - 5g infra could likely support this but there's no way AT&T or Verizon will give a reasonable amount of data for $25/month which is the most I'd imagine somebody would want to pay for a device specific data plan
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This is correct. Tethering is flaky. I was trying to tether my iPad to my iPhone just last night, eventually gave up and just read my book on my iPhone instead. If I depended on tethering for actually getting my work done I'd have an aneurism.
As someone who has, and still does attempt work via iOS tethering it is in fact a complete dumpster fire. Frequent disconnects which force me to constantly revisit the Settings app to disable & reenable is a nightmare. At this point, after many years of the same level behavior, I suspect the disfunction is on purpose (probably a back room deal with cell phone providers)
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Which is presumably hard to impossible without flying around the world with test chips and physically being in those places, as I guess only a handful of carriers can and will reveal all their config settings and software stacks in practice. The more I think about this modem development problem the harder it seems to get. No wonder Apple have struggled and nobody else even seems to try. The amount of tribal knowledge…
> Which is presumably hard to impossible without flying around the world with test chips and physically being in those places We had people driving around with our phones logging to a laptop. They basically drove all over the country, trying to cover as much land as possible, and the phone(s) would then attempt to connect to different base stations. The logs from this would be sent back to the developers to investiga…
Mobile carriers still do this type whether via contractors or their own staff. Unfortunately, there's nothing that beat boots-on-the-ground field testing with actual devices (plural), which is already notoriously unreliable and prone to noise.
It's especially tough in countries with a large landmass (e.g. Canada, USA, Australia, Russia, China, Brazil, etc.).
What’s the fundamental reason why SOTA modems are more challenging than microprocessors for Apple? Intuitively I would’ve guessed the opposite was true.
* Nowadays clock speeds are so fast that you have a lot of analog things to worry about with all these high speed serial lines and on the chips themselves. But the domain constraints are in general simpler, with recovery and reconstruction opportunities available due to things like how you structure your protocols. The same is true in radio (came from radio, actually) but when you have a device operating at arbitrary and continually changing orientations, with all sorts of unknown environments outside you get all sorts of unpredictable multipath, loss, ringing and innumerable other problems to deal with.
What’s the fundamental reason why SOTA modems are more challenging than microprocessors for Apple? Intuitively I would’ve guessed the opposite was true.