[bombcar]

Apple has enough cash on hand to buy 1/3 to half of Qualcomm but the government would likely shut that down quite quickly.

So they’ll roll their own. They built a CPU so a modem shouldn’t be incredibly difficult.

[nerdjon]

This isn't quite them just building their own. Or at least presumably.

in 2019 they bought the modem business from Intel.

[tnel77]

I feel like this is getting a little nuanced. “They bought a company to get a head start, thus they didn’t actually create their own modem.”

It’s been roughly four years since that purchase. Surely they’ve done some work since then that would justify labeling it as “Apple created their own modem.”

I feel like this would be comparable to me saying I cooked dinner and someone replying “you bought the food from Kroger and the cookbook from Barnes & Noble, so it doesn’t count” while I stare at a pile of dirty dishes like “sure feels like it counts.”

[joezydeco]

The PASemi team took two years from acquisition to first Apple silicon. I'm guessing the Intel stuff was a lot messier. It's not like Intel was a streamlined company that excelled at embedded SoCs.

[meepmorp]

At least a couple of those years were the pandemic, so that might've affected some timelines.

[nerdjon]

I agree with where you are going with that, but the person I responded too mentioned that they could buy a part part of qualcom but instead just made their own.

But instead they bought part of intel. It doesn't diminish what Apple is building, but I think given the context it is important.

[bombcar]

I was more emphasizing that if Apple was willing to "go it alone" on their CPUs (which they did by an acquisition, to be sure) then they probably have no issue at all "going alone" on the radio/modem, and I'm actually a bit surprised they didn't do that first - I guess modems are more complicated/difficult than CPUs.