I think Qualcomm's strength in cellular is what's killing them in laptops. Force-bundling a 5G modem with a weak CPU results in unbalanced laptops that are too expensive for their performance.
They did, but late 2023 is still a very short timeframe (less than 3 years) to get a custom arm64 CPU architecture, ready to ship.
Pre armv8, Qualcomm had strong custom cores, but Krait (their armv8 custom implementation) didn't exactly perform well compared to basic Cortexes from ARM (a problem that wasn't unique to Qualcomm, to be fair), and Qualcomm moved to using those generic ARM cores on most of their lineup.
Qualcomm reportedly did get some TMSC volume at 5/6nm that would correspond to that timeframe, but the timing would be extremely optimistic considering how long of a lead time you need, even if the Nuvia acquisition solved all their problems.
Slight correction: Krait was the name for the excellent ARMv7 core design. The underwhelming ARMv8 replacement was named Kryo. Confusingly, they (at least for a while) kept the Kryo branding even after they switched to lightly-customized versions of cores designed by ARM.
The renaming part btw was quite awful of them, they had a hard time acknowledging that they went back to Cortex based cores and I remember their press release trying to imply they didn't.
They were quite hammering the fact they had a custom arch pre v8, and the turnaround was difficult for them to admit.
Qualcomm modem license is relatively expensive for a laptop. I suspect that, once Apple is ready to launch their own modem, they will include that in their laptops, too.
It disconnects whenever the laptop enters sleep mode, it causes the phone to run very hot and consume lots of battery and, yes, it requires manual intervention before it can be used.
I agree that overall these are probably small issues, but built-in mobile network access would have usability benefits
With a MacBook internal modem would you then have to purchase another 5G plan and a sim or pay extra for including that in your phone plan? I would imagine it’s not cheap
In my country there are plans that allow for multiple additional devices to be linked to an account.
I wouldn’t have to pay anything extra for a 5G MacBook.
Which of course makes total sense technically. Because for my mobile operator there’s no difference (bandwidth wise. And given the packet switched nature of LTE and later, that’s all that matters) whether I’m tethering or connecting multiple devices.
On Android tethering can be enabled with just a few taps.
I wonder whether this could be automated, e.g. you click on the macOS toolbar and a macOS app communicates with an Android app and the apps do the needed actions in the respective operating systems (enable tethering on Android, connect to the WiFi network from macOS).
On the other hand, from a user's perspective only one SIM card and data allotment is needed. I much prefer two devices that I would own anyway over two SIM cards with (in most cases) separate monthly subscriptions or data packs.
People won't stop buying phones because their laptops are 5G enabled. The laptop's eSIM would be on the same plan as the phone. It would help carriers to push more expensive plans with much bigger data caps, which is easy with 5G. To the point of eating some home broadband market share- I imagine some people canceling their home broadband like they've cancelled their phone landlines, which initially seemed unthinkable.
Qualcomm charges you a device price tax for each modem you install in a device. So Apple is understandably uninterested in paying Qualcomm that much. When Apple moves to its own modems, expect to see them appear in Macbooks.
Commercial customers in the field. But this is also a market segment with basically zero Mac users. And small enough of a market that it's way off Apple's radar.
As someone with a spotty internet connection and who likes to work at coffee shops with annoying login prompts, I'd really appreciate a product like that. I can get a data-only sim from Google Fi for free so it'd be an easy purchase for me.
(I have no idea why my internet connection is so bad. I pay for 20Mb/s, and half the time it's like 200Mb/s and the other half I don't have internet at all.)
Will they be playing catch-up with apple’s CPUs? Maybe.
But maybe there’s a connectivity/ communications and Qualcomm can play to its strengths - e.g. laptops with 5G? Laptops running android? I don’t know.
https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2021/03/16/qualcomm-c...