Apple steps up in-house modem efforts – report

Its dispute with Qualcomm seems to have pushed Apple towards developing its own modem in-house so it no longer has to rely on external suppliers.

Apple has been making its own application processors for years thanks to the ARM IP licensing business model and the acquisition of PA Semi not long after the iPhone was launched. Making a competitive modem is a much trickier proposition, however, which is why Apple continued to pay Qualcomm for the job however deeply it resented doing so.

Following the collapse in relations between them it looked like Apple was going to turn to Intel for all its modem needs, but a report from Reuters would seem to indicate that’s not the long term plan for Apple, and that it would rather have full control over its modem destiny.

Apparently Apple has now shifted its modem silo from the supply chain unit to the hardware design one. Accordingly Johny Srouji, who heads up the hardware side of things at Apple, will now also have to deal with this future modem. This especially makes sense since Srouji, who worked at Intel for a while, was brought in in 2008 to head up the in-house SoC side of things.

The benefits of doing as much manufacturing in-house are clear, especially for products as integrated as Apple ones, but Qualcomm has a clear lead when it comes to modem design. What if the future Apple modem is an order of magnitude slower than Qualcomm – what kind of effect might that have on iPhone sales? We’ll probably find out in a few years.