"Inside Apple’s Spectacular Failure to Build a Key Part for Its New iPhones"

>The 2018 marching orders from Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook to design and build a modem chip—a part that connects iPhones to wireless carriers—led to the hiring of thousands of engineers. The goal was to sever Apple’s grudging dependence on Qualcomm, a longtime chip supplier that dominates the modem market. The obstacles to finishing the chip were largely of Apple’s own making, according to former company engineers and executives familiar with the project. 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.

https://kanebridgenews.com/inside-apples-spectacular-failure... [2023]

A baseband is a really fancy specialized SDR. Most are based on arcane VLIW DSP architectures like Qualcomm’s Hexagon or Samsung Marconi - you’ll usually have several DSPs handling the different physical layer channels, and then some coordinating DSPs doing L1 channel mixing and timing (in 4G and 5G, various logical and transport channels are muxed into the same physical channels).

Then a set of higher level processor cores (usually referred to as CP, sometimes still a DSP but often a general purpose application processor like ARM) will handle the MAC and above. There will be occasional fixed function blocks for some common protocol functions, but generally it’s less “analog magic” in the way people think when they hear “radio” and more “DSP magic.”

Seems like the difficult part is doing that effectively while avoiding IP issues -- patents on software and math have entrenched Qualcomm's dominance.

Imagine if all of the IP for ML or AI were held by a single company that got the regulating body (ITU/3GPP) to require their use. Makes a mockery of FRAND terms.

Building a cellular modem, complete with working protocol stack, entirely in software has been done as a 1 person open source project.

Making a production -ready modem is clearly more complex, but far from hard for a company with the resources of Apple.

However, doing so whilst not violating any of qualcomms huge array of patents is the real challenge.

I'm willing to bet that the release date of this phone probably closely aligns with the expiry date of a patent they couldn't work around.

And even CPUs (esp state of art) have to worry about radio effects, as in avoiding internally and across chipset.

Easy to believe radios would be an order of magnitude harder, what with the ancient proprietary standards and actual physical radio stuff. (The closest CPUs get is serdes and in my experience those are bought in from Synopsys et al.)

It is a ridiculous amount of work and if you're new to the business, it takes a long time just to be build the lab test suite. And you need to support not just the latest and greatest protocols but also legacy ones. The operators have their own say and test labs as well and they all have slightly different setups and requirements.

> And even CPUs (esp state of art) have to worry about radio effects, as in avoiding internally and across chipset.

Radio effect are rarely an issue with regular chips. Crosstalk within a chip only happens between wires that are within hundreds of nanometers separated from each other.

I'm an amateur, so welcome correction with this, but I'm also not convinced. For one example, ref this RFI mitigation with Intel's gen 12 processors: https://edc.intel.com/content/www/cn/zh/design/ipla/software...

The hard part is designing a good modem while also unambiguously working around all the Qualcomm patents in all the jurisdictions that have iPhone, which is all of them.

Because if you don’t do that, you’re still paying Qualcomm which defeats an important purpose of making your own modem.

[0] Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory. Each one of those words has a funny legal definition separate from whatever English you're thinking of.

[1] Who, incidentally, sold Apple the modem division that made the C1, because Intel is nothing but a bottomless pit of bad management decisions

As the reply below, Apple still has to pay its SEP. Given Apple has its current deal with Qualcomm until 2027 with time to extend further we likely won't know the full details. Previously it was 5% of Wholesale price for all Qualcomm patents whether they are SEP, wireless or not. With a cap or maximum $20 per smartphone meaning the Pro range don't have to pay a lot more. And rebate towards the modem Apple purchase. The reality after deducting rebate Apple was paying closer to 5%. For reference Ericsson ask for 3% on 5G SEP, previous Cory ruling suggest reality was closer to 2%.

It's the opposite, AArch64 was designed by ARM in order to produce their CPUs.

Nobody will use a phone company that doesn't work with iPhones.

If there are reports of iPhones failing to work reliably from Kansas City to Kuala Lumpur then it would be unlikely to be the operators being blamed here.

A modem, well nobody's going to help them build one of those; it'd put them out of business - ARM's business _is_ selling access to its body of work.

Can you give some examples? I'd like to test one out but I'm not buying the most recent product as a rule.

(Yes, the phone expensive now, but these SE-tier phones typically get discounts pretty quickly after release through carriers/non-apple retail; and then a bigger & formal sale price decrease when the next phone generation comes out.)

The C1 modem gets a line because Wall Street has seen that expense for a decade now, so this is a “win” for them. Battery chemistry is completely 3rd party, so they’ll claim the battery life improvement

Putting the new modem into the new "budget" phone reduces expectations so that the impact of any issues will be blunted. Only when all the problems have been ironed out, that will be when the mainstream iPhones will get the new modem.

They acquired part of Intel and worked on this for many years. Shareholders want to know what the result of all that money and time was.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX6X3LL/A/magsafe-charger...

Using a case with the magnet ring in it solves this problem for the 16e without the ring in the phone itself.

I half suspect you're trolling based on this and your other comments under this post, but in case you're not, the Magsafe charger specs state they are Qi compatible.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX6X3LL/A/magsafe-charger...

  > The MagSafe Charger is compatible with Qi2 and Qi charging, so it can be used to 
  > wirelessly charge your iPhone 8 or later, as well as AirPods models with a wireless
  > charging case, as you would with any Qi2 or Qi-certified charger. 

https://www.anker.com/products/y1811

I paid $25 for something from China. It took a month to arrive, but it works great.

Look ma, no magnets!

(See also: https://www.proclipusa.com/pages/product-finder)

I was pretty close to picking up the new SE4 to replace my iPhone 14 Pro and I'm balking at the lack of MagSafe on top of the $599 pricetag.

You’ll need to answer for yourself: more battery life or MagSafe?

I understand that. My point being that 25 year old tech, before the real miniatyrization of circuits and power efficiency mind you, has 7x charge time and yet we are impressed by a few additional hours.

> Here is an experiment to try. Use your phone as you currently do, but turn on airplane mode when you aren't otherwise using the phone. Leave it on overnight too.

Sure but to what benefit?

I already addressed the tweaks i did do in a sibling comment. Putting the phone in airplane mode is no different than having a dead battery in terms of usability.

This is stuff your Nokia didn’t do at the same scale. At best some sms at a significantly reduced polling rate.

My apps auto update in the background. Something my Nokia from 2007 didn’t do.

So there are many passively provided features but by definition they are not obvious to you and as such harder to appreciate.

If you have an iPhone: I use low power mode constantly. I have an automation to use it at 75% or less battery.

I get roughly 2 days of battery life without any YouTube usage.

SMS was piggybacked onto the control plane messaging. That is why the limit was 160 chars (only space available) and why texts can still work when the cell towers are overloaded.

Yes because those phones by comparison do nothing so it’s a meaningless comparison.

It’s like arguing that we shouldn’t be impressed about EV range improvements because the bicycle exists.

We were able to call with them and send messages. On top of that I mostly use browser with my current phone on comparison, while not necessary.

Acting like physics doesn’t exist and we should be able to get a month long battery life whilst doing all of the above is idiotic. No other way to describe it.

I see it got you riled up for some reason, but I cannot see why.

Well, it's about the same as using Nokia 3310.

All batteries degrade when you subject them to 1000 full recharge cycles.

Odd. I wonder if you have some apps updating in the background a lot.

Both my personal and my work iPhones are two-years-old, and both will last several days even with audio streaming.

I put my work phone in its drawer last Thursday, and when I took it out on Tuesday, it still had 11% left.

The drop down menu doesn't actually disable bluetooth so that alone won't work.

It'd usually last around 2 weeks with data off. I imagine an iPhone would fare even better.

Part of it is certainly the modem, but part of it is also likely to be the larger battery.

I'm really curious to see both how the Apple C1 performs and also how they changed up the internals for a larger battery and how much larger that battery is.

Lots of people are mad about losing magsafe but in magsafe phones the magnets sit flush with the frame in a huge circular cutout just below the back glass. The hole weakens the frame so the frame has to be thicker because of it.

I don't think there is really a world where this phone gets 6 more hours of battery life while still having magsafe and fitting into the existing shape of the iPhone 14.

https://youtu.be/mFuyX1XgJFg?t=227

It can easily be measured from the time required to fully charge the phone (when turned off), and continuously monitoring the power it draws from the charger.

The exact mAh is only secret until the first non-Apple person who wants to know gets one.

According to reports, the 16e has a slightly smaller battery than the iPhone 16. 3279 mAh in the 16e vs. 3561 mAh in the 16.

There would be manufacturing differences that would induce at least some variation from phone-to-phone.

[1] https://www.mysmartprice.com/gear/mobiles/mobiles-news/apple...

But given that the cameras got swapped out for a single lens, the MagSafe magnets were removed, etc, it’s certainly conceivable that they freed up space internally for a larger battery in the 16e!

Otherwise what would a video playback time spec have to do with the efficiency of the cellular radio?

The surprise is how much power that is. It's either that or misleading marketing. I know Apple struggled to make this modem, so maybe it's still not great when it comes to standby power consumption. Since it's Apple we will only know after quite a bit of independent testing...

Cellular modems are constantly reading and broadcasting messages to the cellular network unless they are explicitly turned off

Turning off your modem is second only to turning off your screen if you’re looking to save battery

When actively receiving data, a cellular modem will use significantly more power than when idle, with the exact amount depending on factors like network strength, data rate, and the specific modem technology, but typically ranging from several hundred milliwatts to a few watts

Your phrasing requires prior knowledge of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro. It's also defining an interval without giving context to whether that interval is meaningful, where on the interval the 16e exists, and if any of the preceding are meaningful. The increased precision comes at the cost of conciseness and clarity.

Apple's, on the other hand, tells me that this is the best battery life an iPhone has had in this form factor. No unnecessary priors being pulled; I just need to know if I like a 6.1" screen.