Qualcomm-Funded Study Finds Qualcomm's Modems Outperform Apple's C1 Chip in Real-World Tests (yahoo.com) 40
A Qualcomm-commissioned study found that Apple's inaugural C1 modem, debuting in the iPhone 16e, significantly underperformed compared to Qualcomm-powered Android devices in challenging network conditions. The research by Cellular Insights tested devices on T-Mobile's 5G network in New York City, where Android phones achieved download speeds up to 35% faster and upload speeds up to 91% quicker than the iPhone 16e.
The performance gap widened when networks were congested or devices operated farther from cell towers -- precisely the scenarios where next-generation modems should excel, according to the report. The iPhone 16e became "noticeably hot to touch and exhibited aggressive screen dimming within just two-minute test intervals" during testing. This study arrives as Apple attempts to reduce its dependence on Qualcomm, which has historically provided modems for the entire iPhone lineup and represents roughly 20% of Qualcomm's revenue.
The performance gap widened when networks were congested or devices operated farther from cell towers -- precisely the scenarios where next-generation modems should excel, according to the report. The iPhone 16e became "noticeably hot to touch and exhibited aggressive screen dimming within just two-minute test intervals" during testing. This study arrives as Apple attempts to reduce its dependence on Qualcomm, which has historically provided modems for the entire iPhone lineup and represents roughly 20% of Qualcomm's revenue.
I don't know about the performance (Score:1)
Now to be fair I'm stuck on T-Mobile (I'm on an old plan with a good price and if I switch to another carrier I'm going to be paying an extra $600 or $700 a year) but
Re: (Score:3)
What you want is a low resolution LCD.
The higher the pixel density of an LCD, the more powerful the back light needs to be. Only fraction of the light makes it past the transistors and wiring in the LCD panel.
Try turning down the brightness and/or using dark mode.
Re: (Score:2)
And yeah the higher density is probably a big part of the problem too. Why in God's good name I need to have a 4K display on my 5-in screen is beyond me but here we are...
While I'm complaining about unnecessary features my phone weighs a ton because it has a heavy metal back that adds nothing (you could easily get better radio reception by running a sma
Re: (Score:2)
Back when it was Intel modems, Apple deliberately limited the performance of Qualcomm modems so that all iPhones were performing identically.
They bought Intel's modern business and that's what they are using now, so it's not surprising that it's still worse.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe Apple just used them as a base and has been improving them, they can certainly afford the engineers.
But if not iPhones are going to suck for a while.
Re: (Score:2)
I miss having a nice 60 FPS LCD
Oh, fuck no.
I snagged a deal on the 15 Pro when the 16 models came out, and there's no way I'd go back to a 60hz display. Aside from having to get used to the larger form factor (I'd previously used a 13 mini), I'm really liking this phone. In fact, after showing my father the included Image Playground (that's Apple's AI image generator), he actually decided to make the jump to a 16e. The /. hivemind might hate AI, but my retired father gets a kick out of sending cute images to his step-grandkids.
I'm usu
What are the advantages to the high refresh rate? (Score:2)
My old lcd-based Motorola could go 12 hours before I felt the need for a charge and the chipset wasn't even all that efficient.
My OnePlus 13r can barely make it through the day although at least it can make it through the day. About 8 hours in and I need to recharge it. To its credit it charges incredibly fast but still.
Re: (Score:2)
In a word: scrolling. That's where the 120hz refresh really shines.
It's been a long time since I've used an Android phone, but there's usually an option to cap the refresh rate if you think it's what's killing the battery. Though, as the phones utilize dynamic refresh rates, capping the display to 60hz may not provide the battery savings that you're expecting. Never hurts to try, I suppose.
I think the real battery sucking aspect of OLED displays is that in real-world use, you've really crank the brightne
Re: I don't know about the performance (Score:2)
Man bites dog vs dog bites man (Score:4, Insightful)
A Qualcomm-commissioned study found that Apple's C1 modem underperformed compared to Qualcomm-powered devices
"We commissioned a study, and, wouldn't you know it, our device was better than our competitors"
The real newsworthy item would be if they had commissioned a study that showed they had been beaten by their competitor
Re: (Score:3)
For sure that's accurate, Qualcomm has been in the modem business for what, like 40 years now? Maybe longer? They should be putting up big numbers.
I am sure they see the writing on the wall, only another generation or two of Apple using it's in-house modems and Apple as a customer is done with Qualcomm forever.
I would see it as inevitable, Apple rarely goes back on vertical integration but I suppose this is to keep certain customers aware and Apple not so comfortable making that switch in their high end dev
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe but if I were a betting man I would say Apple increments their modems into more models for the next couple generations and then it will be all encompassing across their product lines.
The fact it has taken so long is exactly why I think this will happen, if it was never gonna be worth the investment they would have just abandoned the modem thing and moved on but they seem to have "dicked around" with it enough to start deploying it. Didn't a lot of people say the same thing when they dumped Qualcomm a
Re: (Score:3)
Apple's been trying to use Intel modem technology since the iPhone 7 which came out NINE YEARS AGO. Apple bought the Intel modem group and they've been dicking around since then.
Let's be fair here. Intel never got their 5g modem working/shipping, so part of what they were doing during that time was making it actually... you know... work.
The fact that this product is barely worthy of Apple's lowest-tier product means Apple has a long-ass road before this modem is where it needs to be; but in the meantime Qualcomm will continue to make their modems better - faster speeds, more bands, more technologies, lower power.
Lower power, no. The Apple chip uses 25% less power than Qualcomm's modem. And it is unclear how much of Qualcomm's superiority in those other areas was because of the modem itself versus other aspects of the phone (antenna design, for example). It's way, way too early to call the game.
In particular, having good download performance and terrible
Re: (Score:2)
Intel did have their models shipping. They were used in some iPhones. In fact, both Intel and Qualcomm modems were used in the iPhone 11, with the Intels performing much more poorly in otherwise the same hardware. In 2019, Apple bought what was left of Intel's cellular modem business.
Re: (Score:2)
Intel did have their models shipping.
They had LTE modems shipping. They did NOT have 5g modems shipping. The first iPhone with 5g was the iPhone 12, which was released in 2020, long after Intel sold off their modem division.
Citation: Intel's announcement about exiting the modem business [intc.com]. From the press release:
"The company will continue to meet current customer commitments for its existing 4G smartphone modem product line, but does not expect to launch 5G modem products in the smartphone space, including those originally planned for launche
Re: (Score:2)
The Apple chips probably use less power because they are like WinModems, i.e. they offload some of the processing to the CPU. Qualcomm ones have their own CPU and firmware.
It will be interesting to see what effect that has on iPhone performance.
Re: (Score:2)
>I'd give it five years, tops, before Qualcomm is playing catch-up, mainly because Apple was angry enough at Qualcomm to buy an entire modem division from another company just to get away from them, so they're not going to stop throwing resources at the problem until they're in the lead.
It's already been NINE years. Qualcomm isn't going to stop improving, and you expect Apple to get ahead in five years? Oh, ok. Whatever.
Re: (Score:2)
>I'd give it five years, tops, before Qualcomm is playing catch-up, mainly because Apple was angry enough at Qualcomm to buy an entire modem division from another company just to get away from them, so they're not going to stop throwing resources at the problem until they're in the lead.
It's already been NINE years. Qualcomm isn't going to stop improving, and you expect Apple to get ahead in five years? Oh, ok. Whatever.
Nine years? The acquisition wasn't finalized until December 2019. It took them a little over five years to get from where Intel left things to silicon that worked well enough for them to ship it in a product, likely because Apple was working around Qualcomm's patent minefield.
Honestly they are probably right (Score:2)
It's hard for any company to catch up because Qualcomm does the same thing Nvidia does where they monopolize the engineers capable of building the hardware they specialize in by paying those engineers ludicrous amounts of money.
And the work is so specialized and complex and difficult that they're just aren't a lot of engineers that can do it well enough to compete.
Apple has the deep
Re:Honestly they are probably right (Score:5, Insightful)
How much of this, I wonder, is that Qualcomm has patents on things integral to the physics? So that inherently anyone else trying to make a modem has to use alternate means to make it work, which are basically poisoned by the standard so of course they won't work as well?
It can't really be that hard to make a radio from a physics standpoint, but I bet it can be difficult to work around patents. Especially if it's a "dumb" patent like "put a filter here" which should have invalidated the patent due to "anyone skilled in the art" of radio devices... but because of it competitors can't put a filter in that exact spot, so have to figure out some other place to put it which of course doesn't work as well because it isn't where you'd want it...or "we set this frequency so it can only be done using a component with this material's band gap, and we have the patent on this material" or something like that.
That's a very distinct possibility (Score:2)
It's like how I keep going back to Nvidia because every couple of years AMD completely shits the bed on drivers and/or their board partners put substandard electronics on a board so I have to fuck around undervolting the card get it to be functional...
On the other hand this shit where Nvidia puts 8 GB of RAM on a mid-ranged card with a de facto price of $350 and then they have a PCI X8 bus interface making
Re: (Score:2)
Qualcomm modems aren't magic, they are similar in performance to Huawei, better in some ways and worse in others.
It's just that Intel were crap at making modems, and Apple bought their modem business and it continues to be crap.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure they did the same thing with Intel models, as we all know how that turned out. Apple tried them, Qualcomm said theirs were better. Apple went back to Qualcomm because Intel modems were bad.
Makes sense for Apple to try their new modems in their cheapest products.
They tried Intel modems in only a small subset of their products.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure they did the same thing with Intel models, as we all know how that turned out. Apple tried them, Qualcomm said theirs were better. Apple went back to Qualcomm because Intel modems were bad.
These *are* Intel's modems, albeit the 5g versions thereof.
And no, that's not at all accurate. According to Qualcommon, Apple was all set to dump them entirely. Qualcomm reported that in 2018. But Intel couldn't pull off 5g, and in 2019, they announced that they were exiting the modem business, so Apple went crawling back to Qualcomm because they had 5g and Intel didn't and never would.
Two months later, Apple announced that they were buying what was left of Intel's modem division so that their supply c
Re: (Score:2)
A Qualcomm-commissioned study found that Apple's C1 modem underperformed compared to Qualcomm-powered devices
"We commissioned a study, and, wouldn't you know it, our device was better than our competitors"
I don't think the results are surprising (if the results were different, Qualcomm would not have released the study). But since Qualcomm owns a number of fundamental patents in the mobile phone RF world, and Apple has been trying to find ways to avoid paying Qualcomm license fees by using alternative (i.e. less mature and less robust) solutions it is also not surprising. At some point Apple if Apple does not want to be modem shamed it will probably need to pay up for the licenses, and Qualcomm will still
Re: (Score:1)
bias (Score:4, Funny)
Thank God I was born yesterday, and thus can place my full trust in this.
Re: (Score:2)
Budget-ish phone that Apple doesn't want cannibalizing the sales of their higher end models isn't bias, it's business as usual at Apple.
Duh! Of course. (Score:2)
Qualcomm has been going at it for years in modem Land. Infineon tried to get those 5G modems of the ground, couln's, solt to intel, Intel could'nt either, intel sold to apple.
Apple finaly gets the 5G modems of the ground, they underperform? Of course! Do apple modems have to be the very best? Of course not!
As long as in a few iterations the modems become good enough, will be goos enough for apple...
They have some unique potential (Score:1)
One interesting possibility Apple's chip has that Qualcomm does not, is that it could do things like lean on the AI chip for additional help processing the incoming signal, or any other hardware in the phone.
I also figured that the first try from Apple would not be quite as good, it will be interesting to see how fast iterations improve.
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
Trump Department of Justice issues legal opinion that all Trump Executive Orders are Legal and Constitutional.
Even if true it misses the point (Score:2)
C1 is just the first iteration, one or two more, and it will be on par, and completely independent of any other vendor dessign.
By the time they reach C2 or C3 nobody will even think about it anymore.
Repost of a interesting technical opinion on this (Score:3)
Saw same news article [macrumors.com] over on Macrumors.
I read the MR comments to gauge what the ill informed opinions are and I come here for more tech savvy ones.
So it was a nice surprise to see long time MR poster Gengar [macrumors.com] post this in the MR article comments:
The C1 only supports 3X carrier aggregation, so it's not surprising it's being outperformed by Qualcomm modems on T-Mobile's network, when T-Mobile has widely deployed 4X Carrier Aggregation (normally n71, n25, and two channels of n41) and will be rolling out 5X carrier aggregation in areas they have c-band/n77.
The C1 performed well on AT&T and Verizon because they mostly have 3 or fewer channels being aggregated (AT&T usually has n5 and two channels of n77, while Verizon usually has two channels of n77).
The study even says they couldn't confirm (on page 4) if the iPhone supported 4X carrier aggregation like the Qualcomm modems, but it's widely known that it doesn't.
Re: (Score:2)
Where's the study? (Score:2)
Where's the actual study?
All this story links to is a Yahoo Finance blurb which links to another investing blurb. No one links the actual study.
All the blurbs do is use the phrase "up to" a lot. That's historically a loaded phrase when it cones to this sort of thing. I'd like to read the details.