Apple will struggle with 5G for years – analyst

Not only will Apple lag its competitors by at least a year in launching a 5G phone, it might still suck anyway according to a semiconductor analyst.

Bloomberg apparently got hold of a research note from Matthew Ramsay, who heads up the TMT semiconductor business at Cowen. He seems to reckon Apple has boxed itself into a corner by ditching Qualcomm as a 5G modem supplier and is now seriously short of good options in that area. He also expressed surprised that Apple has allowed this situation to develop.

Ramsay detailed four main options for Apple for 5G, but he doesn’t think any of them are great. The first is what is generally assumed: that Apple will launch 18 months behind the competition with an Intel 5G modem that is expected to be inferior and not even support mmWave. The recent MWC show saw the first 5G phones launched but Apple tends to announce new iPhones in September, hence the big lag.

Rubbish option number two is to see if anyone else can help Apple out on the modem side of things. But Huawei is off the table due to all the aggro it’s getting from the US and Samsung would be likely to ruthlessly exploit its overwhelmingly strong bargaining position, since it’s another of the long list of companies Apple is on frosty terms with. Other than that there’s Taiwanese MediaTek, but Ramsay seems to think it’s even further behind than Intel.

A third, highly implausible, option would be for Apple and Qualcomm to kiss and make up. Not only does there seem to have been too many things said that can’t be unsaid in their bitter legal dispute, but that would be an utter humiliation for Apple and surely Qualcomm wouldn’t be able to resist imposing punitive terms. Having said that, sometimes pragmatism and enlightened self-interest prevail, but we would be amazed if they did in this case.

The last option would be for Apple to buy Intel’s modem business from it in order to accelerate the development process. This would be expensive but Apple can certainly afford it. There is, however, no guarantee Apple would improve on Intel’s efforts since modems are hardly a core competence. It’s even less likely that Apple would be able to make a material improvement in the next year or two.

A fifth option not posited by Ramsay would be for an even longer delay in bringing a 5G phone to market. Apple is brilliant at marketing and could easily throw resources at belittling 5G in the short term to downplay the significance of its absence from that market. That argument would certainly find some sympathy from us in the short term, but it would surely start to wear thin before long.