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Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

wsj.com

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Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

#121

Post by mrguyorama »

giobox wrote: post #102
jjtheblunt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cellular ipads have an RF transparent band on their edges. ipad and iphone also have antenna designs integrated with the body design, which currently is only true for wifi and bluetooth in the above mentioned laptops. are you wanting a plastic band atop the laptop closing screen, to get a cellular capable antenna in an otherwise metal body? perhaps that's just not a priority with enough customers.

> are you wanting a plastic band atop the laptop closing screen, to get a cellular capable antenna in an otherwise metal body? I'm almost certain Apple's world class hardware team can integrate a cellular antenna to an aluminum laptop in a way that is visually pleasing, yes. This isn't some insurmountable problem we are positing here.

I mean, that same hardware team designed a fundamentally flawed keyboard to shave like a millimeter from the laptop height.

Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

#122

Post by 8fingerlouie »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #118
8fingerlouie wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

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?

The thing is, GSM is not a single specification. It is layered like the OSI model, and each layer has multiple specifications for different subsystems.

When GSM was originally specified, there was serious doubt if it would work at all on the hardware available at the time.

A GSM call has a 3.62us send window, a 3x3.62us waiting period, and a 3.62us receive slot. That’s probably hard enough to achieve on a single cell, but factor in distance to the tower as well, and the handset has to do a lot of calculations.

Once you start considering handoff between cells things get even more interesting. The handset continuously reports a list of cell towers it can “see” along with the strength of their signals from the handsets position.

Once the cell tower decides that the handset is moving out of range, it propagates a handoff message to its upstream node, which repeats this process until a suitable downstream node is found, and each cell tower is then alerted that the handset with an ongoing call is switching from/to that cell, and finally the handset is informed. The handset has no say in this process other than the list of cell towers.

All of this took place in the late 1980s, it was finalized in 1987, and modern processors at the time would be the Intel 386DX running at 12 to 40 MHz. Obviously not handsets came with a 386 processor, and when I worked on mobile phones in the early 2000s, the norm would be something like an 8 to 12 MHz 16bit platform.

Since then the specification has been revised hundreds of times. In the original specification, messaging (SMS) was an afterthought, and a way of utilizing otherwise unused bandwidth, which was normally reserved for command and control. Turns out messaging was a hit with GenX, so many changes were made to that subsequently, like EMS[1], MMS[2] and RCS[3].

Likewise focus shifted from phone calls to data, which was 4G, and to IoT and always on devices, which is what 5G is about. 4G and 5G also has increased the number of active devices possible.

Add to that WiFi calling and all the other little enhancements, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the specification is closer to 50,000 pages today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Messaging_Service [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

#123

Post by mrlambchop »

pram wrote: post #11

“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

Sounds like an aneccode from a layperson who saw or heard about a bring up board (or protoboard) and went away with the wrong insight.

Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

#124

Post by mcculley »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #107
revicon wrote: post #93

Earlier 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.

I buy Apple not because they make hardware or software but because they make integrated systems of both.

Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

#125

Post by mcculley »

baggy_trough wrote: post #111
lostlogin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, my theory is that the Qualcomm monopoly makes it cost prohibitive. The question I asked is if anyone has evidence for this.

Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

#126

Post by justcradd »

mcculley wrote: post #105
rz2k wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how it will work if you attach an iPhone 15 Pro to your laptop with a short USB/Thunderbolt cable. Presumably it will at least save on rebroadcasting the internet connection.

I often do this with my iPhone 11 Pro. It is dumb and works better than having no connection. It is a ridiculous thing to do at a time when watches have LTE modems.

It is not ridiculous. An extra modem is an extra data line. Tethering works perfectly.

Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

#127

Post by justcradd »

Teever wrote: post #92
jjtheblunt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are these cellular antennas really that much different from the wifi antennas that are already found in Apple laptops?

[dead]

Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

#128

Post by justcradd »

stronglikedan wrote: post #109
Veliladon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally have one click pairing to the Wifi hotspot on an iPhone or iPad logged in to the same iCloud account. Everyone has a phone. Why increase the BOM?

Because hotspot data is always limited compared to a dedicated line. T-mobile's hotspot is all but useless.

[dead]

Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

#129

Post by giantrobot »

crazygringo wrote: post #60
8fingerlouie wrote: post #42

Earlier 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…

Cellular base stations have lots of configurables. There's a lot of timing related settings in cellular radios. So you've got a thousand places to introduce a 500 Mile Email problem[0]. Some timing settings can run up against timing consts in the client firmware.

For instance towers around an airport might have some bands running with reduced power or disabled. This reduces cell size/overlap on those towers requiring more frequent handoffs between those towers. A client firmware might have a bug or unrealistic const set that fails in that frequent handoff situation. So it's a bug that only happens on some 5G bands near an airport but only during the summer because the more arid conditions increase microwave propagation by 1dB.

[0] https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Re: Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones

#130

Post by onetimeuse92304 »

I would like to point out that creating modem chips is probably way harder than it seems. It requires knowledge not available to mere mortals. Can you design a new ARM chip with a GPU? Great, you are at most a demi-god. You probably have to be true master of the Universe to be able to design real RF chips.

Working with RF seems to be a completely different game than high frequency digital circuitry. When you work with high frequency digital signals you are kind of touching RF stuff, but it is more like you do things that "are known to work" rather than completely understanding everything that is happening.

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