Apple goes global in Qualcomm license war: Patent spat hits China Apple has taken its legal battle against Qualcomm international with a pair of lawsuits in China. The suits, filed with the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, accuse the chip designer of breaking China's anti-monopoly law and challenge the patent-licensing contract between Apple and Qualcomm in China. The filings seek …
Qualcomm chips/tech is so good for Apple, that iThingies has generated some of the greatest profits the planet has ever seen and Apple now claims they paid too much for the devixes now? That's a serious stretch IMNSHO. And Apple is a hardware company to begin with unlike most of the rest. Shit.
You think all that profit is due to Qualcomm? They only use their cellular chip, and since two major US carriers use CDMA, they have no choice for a lot of phones they make since Qualcomm makes it untenable for others to license CDMA (that's why Samsung phones sold in the US never use Samsung's SoC with built in non-Qualcomm cellular - it can't do CDMA)
Apple (and Samsung et al) are selling pocket computers that have making/receiving phone calls as but one of their many functions. If I had to choose between giving up cellular connectivity (i.e. had to make calls using wifi only) and giving up all the other non-phone functionality of my phone that Qualcomm has nothing to do with, 100% I'd give up the cellular connectivity.
It's pretty damning that the FTC complaint went in right before the change of presidency and commissioners, when only 3 FTC commissioners were available to vote, and the dissenting one felt strongly enough to publicly damn the other 2 (see here, https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/170117qualcomm_mko_dissenting_statement_17-1-17a.pdf). Essentially we have a short staffed FTC filing grounds against the run of legal precedent in the last gasp of Obama's administration, essentially to pave for Apple to sue to shore up margins on declining sales. Presumably they will use this to try to negotiate better rates. They are about as aggressive towards supplier vendors as any company I've ever seen.
a company whose pinnacle of innovation is a rounded corner, complaining about a company that actually does real engineering R&D with stuff that involves maths, chemistry and physics and lots of resources. i hope they not only get shot down, but also fined double the amount so that they stop bitching and do some real engineering for a change.
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