“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.
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