“According to AppleInsider, over the past three years, Apple has hired at least thirty ‘mid- to senior-level baseband software and hardware engineers from existing players like Broadcom and Qualcomm,'” Chris Reed reports for Wall St. Cheat Sheet. “The reason for these hires, as the common speculation goes, is because the company is trying to bring as much hardware development in-house as possible.”
“What’s interesting about Apple hiring baseband engineers in particular, according to analyst Brian Modoff of Deutsche Bank, is that baseband chipsets are particularly challenging for a company to begin making on its own,” Reed writes. “As quoted by Street Insider, Modoff said, ‘There has been recent speculation in the press about Apple developing their own baseband chipset. We dismissed this early, and felt most others would as well given the herculean task of building a multimode baseband from scratch. As most who follow the wireless industry understand, building a multi-mode baseband is not about R&D dollars.'”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Analyst: No Apple custom baseband chips before 2015 – April 10, 2014
Apple to design its own LTE chips for iPhone 7; to be stamped by Samsung and GlobalFoundries, sources say – April 8, 2014
“We dismissed this early” – What a stupid thing to say about APPLE. 😎
And there is no way a computer company is just going to walk in and make a cell phone…
There at least four ways Apple can grow:
1) Add new product categories
2) Reach new customers with insightful/inspiring marketing
3) Sell upgrades with better components from suppliers
4) Sell upgrades via improved internal sw/hw component design, production & integration
While the press likes to obsess about these in the order above, I believe Apple obsesses about them in the reverse order. Their main day-to-day focus is making their existing products better for their existing customers from the atoms and bits up.
That laser focus on bottom-up quality for existing customers also happens to help them create new products and attract new customers.
can’t help but be reminded of Ed Cooligan’s take on a similar situation
Exactly…Palm’s Ed Colligan, in 2006: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
Ed Colligan: Here’s a guy building off Apple’s own Newton technology saying this rubbish. *boggles*
Aren’t you thinking of former Apple exec Jon Rubinstein, who took the reins of Palm’s runaway stagecoach from Ed Colligan in 2009?
No.
For newbies:
Colligan was president and CEO of Handspring prior to the Palm/Handspring merger in 2003. Before Handspring, he led the marketing campaign at Palm, Inc. that launched the Palm family of PDAs and smartphones. Earlier in his career, he served as vice president of strategic and product marketing for Radius Corporation.
But now I do comprehend how he made his nonsensical statement. He’s not a tech. He’s marketing. I.E. he was probably unaware of the tech lineage from Apple’s Newton to the Palm.
I defer to your Sherlockian analytics 🙂
Is that your red hair, Ms. Hannah?
No. I wear it shorter and don’t use the severe colouring she favours. – I couldn’t obtain permission to use the image, so I revived my switchboard avatar. (I haven’t yet located a suitable Polgar to match the brooding botvinnik)
😀 I was around in London while the maroon hair color was all-the-rage. Sharon Osbourne will wear it now and again to shock people.
I’m also reminded of the dull-wit meme that red hair is going to go extinct in the next generation, presumably through interbreeding and recessive genes. So little do we comprehend biology.
Always a pleasure, dear goddess. 😉
Derek, something doesn’t add up in your account. Colligan’s marketing background would seem to guarantee he knew all about PDAs, and crucially the Newton had become a marketing case study because of the Doonesbury comic strip demolition of its handwriting-recognition gaffes.
So it would seem more likely that he did know of the Newton but practiced a bit of disingenuity, or at least disrespect for what Apple engineers had achieved with the Newton. It can’t have been amnesia or sloppiness, can it?
Heh heh! I guess I’m not particularly interested the motivation for his wrong statement. It’s simply clear that he made a wrong statement, deliberate or from within a mental vacuum. It’s all over now, poor Palm.
I tend to dwell on behaviours in the workplace because they can teach us why people trip up big time. There is still much to be learnt from defunct operations. This one case study could be a classic “blind spot.” Recall that Research in Motion made similar dismissive noises about the iPhone, but internally they were sweating bullets because they DID realise that what Apple had accomplished was immense. The poor fools could only play for time.
If only RIM had been ready for the perpetual ‘research’ required to stay on top of the game. I don’t know enough of their history to understand why they stuck to physical keyboards and their ‘pearl’ thingy for so long. I know they received some positive feedback from many users for these features. But everything else passed them by on the racetrack.
Umm… And what does it take to design a cpu inhouse? Like the a6 or a7 ..
Qualcomm and Broadcom have nothing to worry about! Buy!Buy!Buy!
Remember a couple of years back when they were saying the same thing about Blackberry? Probably one of the same guys too..
It seems like a lot of work to go through just to make your own baseband chip set, versus buying them from Qualcomm. I mean, how much money per unit would be saved? But wait! What if Apple needs a custom baseband chipset of its own in order to introduce its own phone service? In that case a custom made, proprietary baseband chipset not only makes perfect sense, it would be a necessity.
Intriguing, Zeke! An original idea! What form do you think this service would take?
Something using a 64 bit architecture. 64 bits might enable something beyond LTE, or at least enhance it. Such a system would likely require new infrastructure, so I’m thinking buying somebody like Sprint wouldn’t do it for Apple. But then, Sprint has all of those ClearWire spectrum licenses, enough to reach about 80% of the people on earth. It would be expensive, whatever it is, but then, nobody has ever had this much money to spend on something like this.
Beyond LTE? Can Apple play in that ballpark? That’s audacious.
Who knows? I’m just following where the facts might lead. Apple is arguably designing its own baseband chips. The best reason to do that is to introduce new capabilities or different formats. We’ve been asking ourselves, “Why put 64 bit capability in a smartphone?” Put two and two together and you come up with some really interesting possibilities.