Cook said that he would continue to develop 4G, but why should Apple develop its own 5G baseband chip?

Since last year, Apple has completely abandoned Qualcomm. In the past, Qualcomm has been Apple's baseband supplier, so it has made considerable profits. However, due to the 654.38 billion lawsuit between Apple and Qualcomm, they began to go their separate ways. Qualcomm said that Apple could not make an iPhone without its own chip. Apple believes that Qualcomm has charged unreasonable patent licensing fees in the past. So now Apple has ruled out Qualcomm and started to use Intel as a new baseband supplier.

But with Intel chips, Apple faces a dilemma. Intel used to be called "Toothpaste Factory" by the outside world, especially its baseband has been much worse than that of Qualcomm, and Apple is unwilling to pay more patent fees, so it uses the baseband of Toothpaste Factory. However, the communication performance of the chips provided by Intel has been very poor, and the signal is poor, especially the network speed has been slower than that of the Android camp. Especially in 5G, Apple may fall behind its rivals. In the current downturn in sales, the backwardness of 5G is bound to alert Apple.

At present, Apple's 5G iPhone will not be released until 2020 at the earliest. The biggest root of this is that Apple has changed its chip supplier, and the core advantage of the new supplier Intel in the past was in the traditional computer field, and less effort was made in the mobile field. Moreover, Intel previously admitted that 5G chips could not be listed earlier than 20 19 and 10, which was tantamount to making Apple feel at a loss.

Faced with the dilemma, Apple began to find a way out for itself, that is, self-research. Recently, Apple transferred the modem chip engineering business from the supply chain department to the internal hardware technology department. This means that Apple began to develop its own baseband chip. Due to the great success of A series chips in the past, Apple naturally has the ability to develop its own baseband. At present, Apple has released the recruitment information of modem engineers to build its own team.

However, it will take several years to develop baseband chips. Apple, in particular, naturally understands that competitors are already producing their own next-generation modems, including Samsung and Huawei, and especially support 5G. Although Apple needs to invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year, it can eventually save a lot of money for Apple. If about 200 million iphone are produced every year, and a single chip 15 to 20 dollars, then the annual cost savings of Apple may be between 3 billion dollars and 4 billion dollars. Apple will eventually unify the supply capacity of key components of the iPhone, including its own A-series processor, GPU, power chip and next-generation screen display technology, and improve and polish the performance of the iPhone through self-research of these key components.