
Apple deleted a job listing that hints at plans to cut Qualcomm and Intel chips - lnguyen
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-deleted-job-listing-shows-plans-design-5g-modem-2018-4
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skywhopper
Are we sure they didn’t just... hire someone?

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pertsix
They could have certainly put out the job posting for visa reasons :)

[http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=APPLE+INC&job=&city=&year=2...](http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=APPLE+INC&job=&city=&year=2017)

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thisisit
The amount of extrapolation seems a bit extreme - one deleted job opening
shouldn't mean anything. But I guess in the age of clickbait journalism
everything goes.

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esturk
If you consider just this one data point yes, it may seem far-fetched. But if
you connect it with all the other data points from all the other rumors, then
whose to say it's over reaction?

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dchuk
Sort of related:

For a while now I’ve been thinking that a product that helps you monitor your
competitor’s job postings could be pretty interesting. Anyone here find value
in that concept? It wouldn’t be for finding a job necessarily, but instead to
keep a pulse on the potential health/direction of those in your niche.

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gumby
I often check the job listings of competitors to see what they are up to, so
using this as part of a "what are these companies up to" (patent filings, job
listings, various updates) would be good. It's a hard problem because some
companies generate a lot of noise (unenlightening press), or some companies
are large so have lots to talk about in areas that don't matter to me, but
typically most startups generate so _little_ noise that simply sending me 100%
of new news, website changes etc would be useful.

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dchuk
Thanks for the reply! Would you be at all interested in chatting a bit more
via email about this?

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gumby
sure, address in my profile

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aeturnum
I mean, of course they are. I guarantee Apple is considering moving every
aspect of their products in house. They'll end up keeping a lot of them
external, but they look at all of it.

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ajross
Indeed. It strains reason to think that a company with cash reserves the size
of Apple's wasn't at least exploring the possibility of making their own
radios. Hiring a few experts on a moonshot project is cheap relative to the
benefits if it pays off. It's likely Google has a similar group.

Whether they produce hardware or not is an open question though. High end RF
efforts tend to fail a lot. I mean, for high end LTE we're already in a
situation where there are only two serious vendors.

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tim--
Wouldn't an organisation such as Apple (who must be one of Qualcomm's largest
customers, surely...) already share design information such as this with
engineers inside Apple?

This job ad to me doesn't sound like a smoking gun to get rid of Qualcomm.

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saagarjha
> Wouldn't an organisation such as Apple (who must be one of Qualcomm's
> largest customers, surely...) already share design information such as this
> with engineers inside Apple?

I don't see your point, and besides, Apple silos their information so that
it's only available on a need-to-know basis.

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joshl32532
In an efficient market, companies (Intel and Qcomm in this case) would compete
to produce products (5G modem) that can tailor to multiple customers for
maximum volume to recoup R&D cost. This will converge in the best product at
the best price.

I wonder what would be the benefit of Apple producing their own chip?
Especially with the threat of "peak iPhone" looming.

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simonh
The problem facing Qualcomm is that their main customer for high end modems is
Apple, the units they sell to the Android manufacturers are much lower volume
(at the high end) and for much less money.

Apple has noticed that if they make these advanced modems themselves, the
Android ecosystem doesn't have enough profit in it to make building high end
modems just for that market viable. At least, it might well force Qualcomm to
design down their best modems to meet lower price points at lower volumes than
they can achieve now.

This is aside from the advantages Apple would have in tailoring their hardware
and software to each other, and guaranteeing they get the hardware features
they need to achieve their end-user facing feature goals.

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martin_bech
And.. if they can make them even more low power, as they have the CPU/GPU and
Wireless (Bluetooth/wifi). they might get an even larger advantage on
battery/performance.

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magoon
Apple is now a semiconductor company.

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ascagnel_
It was a matter of time, really. They already design their own and basically
own all, if not the vast majority, of the production capacity of TSMC.

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tooltalk
Sure, Apple is TSMC's #1 customer and uses the vast majority of TSMC's latest
node. But TSMC is much larger than that.

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baybal2
The coming 5G comes to mind. The problem with Qcom and 5G is that they do not
even hide the fact that they wont to monopolize the technology through IP
capture.

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dang
Url changed from [https://gizmodo.com/apple-posts-deletes-job-listing-that-
sou...](https://gizmodo.com/apple-posts-deletes-job-listing-that-sounds-
suspicious-1825672682), which points to this.

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kw71
With no experience rolling subscriber access silicon or MMIC this is likely to
have comedic results.

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aaronbrethorst
Steve Ballmer agrees wholeheartedly.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U)

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dang
Please don't post flamebait.

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beedogs
That's cool, but not for me.

I didn't buy Apple products before they went x86, and I won't buy any after,
either.

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Tsiklon
Looking at the article - this is related to the Cellular modems in their
telephones as opposed to the CPUs running in their Macintoshes.

Judging by Apple's success in creating powerful low energy ARM processors I'd
be quite interested in seeing how they can do in designing their own 4/5G
modems.

