Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is not what a market failure is.
Well it’s not a success, so what it is?
It might very well be a success if most people don't care about modems and/or it would be cost prohibitive to provide the option.
Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
111–120 of 188 posts
Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
#112“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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Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
A long time ago i used to work at a company that made mobile phones. This was in the days before smartphones, and 3G was a shiny new toy. Back then, many companies would implement the protocols in the phone firmware, as opposed to today where chips usually offload a large part of this. Despite doing our best to implement the GSM Standards[1], the thing at the time was 19,000 pages long, and one of our biggest issues…
This. The standard is also truly horrible to read. It's not really designed to be read, as much as it is an after-the-fact description of what somebody has already done. To the point that testing against a very wide variety of base-stations (and the multitudinous variety of configuration options in those base-stations) is mandatory.
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Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> and somewhat often a bug would only manifest itself on a single cell tower. I can easily understand different brands/products/generations having their quirks, but I'm struggling to imagine what the source of uniqueness could be for a single cell tower. Is it a huge variety of config options, that certain combinations of settings turn out to be rare? Or is it literally just something broken like malfunctioning hardw…
> but I’m struggling to imagine what the source of uniqueness could be for a single cell tower.
GSM is/was a complex beast. Each base station can only handle 8 simultaneous phone calls (the old 2G/3G multiplexed ones, not modern VoIP), so in crowded areas they’re usually configured with a very short range. Some large conferences have had base stations with their range measured in single digit meters (Furthermore, like WiFi, bandwidth is limited, so base stations are deployed in a “beehive like pattern”, like a triangle with a base station radiating out from each leg, and broadcasting at different frequencies to it’s neighbors.
That alone leaves a lot of room for configuration errors on each individual base stations, but when i say “a single cell tower”, i meant on that drive. The bug might be with a specific firmware version of that base station manufacturer, or that particular hardware revision, or simply a configuration error, or maybe it was a bug in our software and/or radio firmware. There are a lot of “moving parts” that needs to be investigated, but from a developer perspective, the error only occurred on one base station.
It could of course also turn out to be a “broken” base station, and often enough we would fail to find the error, and had to contact the network operator to get them to help trace down the error.
Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
#115What’s the fundamental reason why SOTA modems are more challenging than microprocessors for Apple? Intuitively I would’ve guessed the opposite was true.
Analog is hard, and quite different from digital.* And then you have to work around the patent thicket in an already difficult domain. * 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 ho…
> Analog is hard, and quite different from digital.
In the infamous words of Bob Widlar [0]: "Every idiot can count to one."
[0] For those who don't recognise the name, Widlar was a legendary analog designer - along with Jim Williams and Bob Pease.
Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>> 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. 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 i…
I had assumed it was a lot less these days.
One good thing that came out of it was the low power “GPS” on early smart phones, the ones that would triangulate the phones position from what cell towers it could “see”. That would not have been possible without someone driving around “everywhere” and recording GPS location alongside cell signal strength.
As far as i know it is less frequently used today than it was a decade ago, but i could be wrong. GPS in smartphones have moved from technology[1] to something you just use without thinking about how it works.
Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
5G is absolutely insane. 100Mb/s for 20 USD/mo on a mobile phone in Hong Kong is absolutely mind-blowing. I suppose in low density areas like Tokyo, New York or Paris, it might be slower in some patches ?
What are you doing on a handheld device screen that would blow your mind once the novelty of seeing the big numbers on speedtest app wore off? Genuinely curious- what can you do on 5G phone that you can’t on your 4G phone?
Upload video, sync photos, backup the phone, watch 4k movies, etc
Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
#118What’s the fundamental reason why SOTA modems are more challenging than microprocessors for Apple? Intuitively I would’ve guessed the opposite was true.
A long time ago i used to work at a company that made mobile phones. This was in the days before smartphones, and 3G was a shiny new toy. Back then, many companies would implement the protocols in the phone firmware, as opposed to today where chips usually offload a large part of this. Despite doing our best to implement the GSM Standards[1], the thing at the time was 19,000 pages long, and one of our biggest issues…
If I ran a company where someone tried to release a 19K page spec I'd keep firing people until someone could produce a spec that I could actually review and sign off on, that could also still be reproduced in working technology. How does this kind of thing fly at all?
Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
#119Paywalled
Reminder: If you have Apple News (or get it bundled with Apple One), it includes access to the Wall Street Journal among many other paywalled sources. On iOS you can use the share sheet to open the URL in news and it will auto-open it. Otherwise you can search for the title. I do wish this feature was better integrated, and using the share sheet to open with any app including News seems always confusing - you're neve…
Thanks!
I ran into a little trouble where I tried to long-press the link here on HN and use that share sheet to open in News - it’s not there
I eventually got there after clicking through to the paywalled article.
I kind of wonder what’s different between the two.
Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple really really really wants to make more money from software subscriptions rather than hardware. They have a much better chance to do this in their walled garden environment of iPhones and iPads rather than on OSX where they face competition from other vendors. They have no incentive to make it easier to be mobile on your macbook when they would much rather you be on your iPhone and iPad instead. Someday they wo…
They make almost all their profits from hardware, and use good software as a strategy to sell more hardware.
Apple's gross margin percentage for its services segment (App Store, Apple Music, AppleCare, Apple Pay, iCloud storage services, AppleCare warranties, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, and the Apple Card) is almost twice that of the products segment.
In 2021, the gross margin percentage for the services segment was nearly 70% as compared to the 35% gross margin percentage from the products segment.
https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology-media-an...