In recent years, Apple has been criticized by consumers for "poor signal". From iPhone X to the present, Apple fans have been suffering, so in the past few years, Apple has continued to invest in research and development on the 
G baseband chip.
In 2020, Apple successfully acquired the Intel baseband business and R&D department. Apple began to embark on the road of independent research and development of baseband chips. Even in each subsequent generation of product updates, many "Apple fans" expect Apple to break through the "signal difference" "difficulties.
results Yesterday, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo revealed that Apple may have failed in the research and development of 5G baseband chips, which means that before 2023, Apple’s iPhones will all use Qualcomm 5G baseband chips.
This also revealed that even though Apple is the “biggest brother” in global technology, it has failed one after another in the research and development of baseband chips. It can be seen that the difficulty of chip research and development cannot be underestimated.
Apple’s bitter experience with baseband chips
actually started in 2018. After Apple launched the iPhone There will be no more Apple after . Each generation of updates is "a new soup without changing the medicine", and the signal is even worse.
Some netizens even said that the appearance of this stainless steel frame on an Apple phone is unexpected. It is not only easy to scratch, but also affects the signal.
As a result, on the later generation of iPhone 11, Apple began to replace the stainless steel frame with an aluminum alloy frame, but the signal was still so poor. At the time of , consumers realized that it was not the influence of the frame, but the internal Intel baseband chip.
But at that time, Apple and Qualcomm were still in a "dispute" state. Because Apple was not satisfied with Qualcomm's 5% patent licensing fee, Apple filed lawsuits in court many times and even directly refused to pay the fee for a period of time.
But in the 4G era, only Huawei , Qualcomm, Samsung and Intel and other manufacturers in the world can implement independent research and development of several chips. Huawei and Samsung basically produce and use them for themselves, and in relation to Qualcomm, Apple still has I didn’t do it well, so I had to start with Intel.
Although Intel's performance is very "tasteless", Apple has no other choice. After all, your own 5G iPhone is about to appear. If the baseband chip is not solved yet, you will lose the opportunity.
In 2019, according to Bloomberg, Intel’s 5G baseband still cannot solve the heat dissipation problem under laboratory conditions.
Faced with such a "desperate situation", Apple could only bite the bullet and reach a settlement with Qualcomm. But on the surface it is a reconciliation, but secretly Apple still has no determination to give up independent research and development.
In March of the same year, Apple directly spent US$1 billion to acquire Intel's mobile phone baseband business, integrating more than 2,000 core talents into Apple Inc. , and also took away related intellectual property rights and equipment.
Intel's baseband cannot solve Apple's "pain points"
Since acquiring Intel's baseband business, Apple has mastered 17,000 wireless technology patents, covering technologies from cellular standard protocols to modem architecture. So that in the next two years, news about Apple’s self-developed 5G baseband chip continued to circulate on the Internet, and it was even reported that Apple had studied millimeter wave technology... But after a deeper understanding, it was discovered that Apple is not that good at all. Solve this pain point quickly.
Because the 5G baseband chip is very complex, there are several just for the division of spectrum range. There are 26 frequency bands below 6GHz and 3 millimeter wave frequency bands. At the same time, the market in mainland China is also different from that in the West. Each country and locality has different base station construction capabilities and the required broadband is also different. Just testing the suitability of broadband chips takes a lot of time.
And this is one step.Due to the diversification of network standards and between countries, the use of time division duplex and frequency division duplex are different, and even high and low spectrums will cause network differences. This is why today's baseband chips are required to support carrier aggregation technology to maximize spectrum utilization.
This also reveals that Apple still has a long way to go in independent research and development of baseband chips.
