Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Wild. There are some other interesting things that came out in this lawsuit. Qualcomm asked Apple to speak out against Y-Max, which is a competing technology. They were like, we need you to vocally speak out that our competitor is a bad piece of technology. They also stipulated that if Apple ever used a competing supplier, and keep in mind, this deal is signed in the early days of the iPhone, if they ever used a competing supplier to Qualcomm, they would owe Qualcomm a billion dollars. What Apple is basically doing is biting their time for there to be an actual credible competitor. They had to wait all the way up until the 4G days until they're looking at Intel and they're like, especially if we work with you and we work closely with you, we think you can be a credible competitor to Qualcomm right now. We think your cellular modems business is close enough, where our customers won't notice the difference, and we can tell Qualcomm that we're going to use you and try to get a little leverage there. What Qualcomm interpret that as is, well, now you owe us a billion dollars because look at our original deal we did. What this basically comes down to from a legal perspective is because Qualcomm owns patents that are a part of an industry standard, they have to charge a price that is fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory, or frand is the industry terminology. Apple's basically alleging, look, you're abusing the market because it's not fair, reasonable. You're highly, highly unreasonable in the way that you're charging us this. Around the time of the iPhone XS and XR, those phones actually did use Intel modems. But what was basically happening is the Intel modems were falling further and further behind Qualcomm. Apple was realizing, oh crap, we're going to miss 5G because there's no chance that Intel catches up right and can actually develop a credible 5G chip. So they end up settling and sort of backing off their big lawsuit with Qualcomm. We're going to escape our technical level of competency quickly if we haven't already, but 5G is pretty cool. You were talking about patents. This all sounds so icky, but the amount of engineering, IP, and work that has to go into what we described originally back in the World War II, it was so crazy complicated to make this stuff work back then. Now it's just like a factor of a million more. The amount of processing, what Moore's law has had to come up the curve to enable something like 5G, is unreal. There's a dedicated processor in front now of the RF stack to do all the crazy multiplexing that is required for 5G bandwidths to work, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.