Is Germany struggling? Because that's where you'd actually need to think with that reasoning as this applies to Germany and not the EU.
I don't think it has anything to do with what Apple wants. The X, and the XS/+ and XR, probably just don't infringe otherwise I'm sure Qualcomm would have had them banned as well.
Your thought process here seems completely skewed. This is just the corporate war waging between Apple and Qualcomm. Which it seems that Qualcomm did try to leverage their advantage in IP for awhile there and rubbed a lot of other companies the wrong way (Apple's not the first to have issues, and QC has been investigated for antitrust issues by the US and EU). I think Qualcomm saw what happened when Apple and Samsung had issues (Apple has shifted very strongly away from Samsung) and doesn't want to make it easy for them to do the same to them. This isn't going to change that (will actually almost certainly reinforce it), but I think Qualcomm is trying to get what they can while they can. If they could get the X and later I'm sure they would have.
You are right, this is just one more step in the patent War Apple and QC are waging currently. Apple is engaging in reverse patent holdout ( https://academic.oup.com/jiplp/article-abstract/13... ) As most of QC patents are part of standards, they are subject to FRAND licensing. This means QC cannot get an injunction on their main patents (4G, 5G...). Apple has refused to pay their license fees for over a year now, so QC is trying to hurt them by using their non-FRAND patents and preventing sale to renegotiate their licenses. (this is all a complicated contract and payment negotiation)
The probable reason the iphone X/XS/XR are not included is because the suit started before their release.
Oh, it is US that is struggling. So many wars and all of them lost. Military budget higher than ever and the costs irrecuperable. National debt growing. China is growing.
I'm not sure where you are getting your information about China growing, but I can say with 100% certainty that things aren't going well over there. Right now their economy is doing VERY badly. Because of the tariff battle, people in China right now are unable to purchase pork. Since they imposed tariff's on our pork imports, and them having issues with diseased pigs, which they are having to kill and bury, prices of all other meat has increased substantially, all while the value of their currency keeps getting devalued. The housing market, especially in Beijing, is very bad. BTW, I know first hand because my wife's parents live in Beijing and told us about it. Don't believe what you keep hearing on the news.
“I know first hand because my wife's parents live in Beijing and told us about it.”
I wouldn’t call it “first hand”. What you’d heard is a bunch of bs from an old couple who tried to get some sympathy ($$$) from you. I don’t know where he gets his info but I know where you get yours, which is from some old nags.
Do you realize that all of these things are possible simultaneously? GDP growth doesn't always mean better conditions for ordinary people. See the USA and UK post-1980s for a vivid demonstration of that.
Actually, this injunction also affects the iPhone X, but not the three newest models. It'll be interesting if QC ends up posting the bond. €668.4 million is about QC's net profit for an entire quarter. There is significant risk in doing so: If the court ends up deciding against them, that bond money would be used to compensate Apple for lost revenue. Apple is initially in a lower risk situation here: by removing the iPhone 7, 8 and 1st generation X from their lineup in Germany, anybody who wants a reasonably current new iPhone is now stuck with their three newest and priciest models. On the other hand, if Apple looses this lawsuit and the inevitable appeals, QC could get a princely sum for damages. Lastly, the presiding judge made an interesting comment on why the court granted the injunction: While Apple/Qorvo stated that their envelope tracking chip is so different from QC's technology that it doesn't violate QC's patents. However, Apple and Qorvo refused to provide details on their envelope tracking tech, making it impossible for the court to judge the merit of QC's infringement claim at this stage, hence the injunction. Basically, Apple/Qorvo simply say their solution is so different that QC's patents don't apply, but have so far refused to tell the court how their supposedly different solution works. This will be interesting.
Good post. There are multiple other non-essential patent claims still in the pipeline in multiple jurisdictions should this one not stick; before the US ITC, only one out of six patents were ultimately found to be infringed by Apple but this is sufficient to grant an injunction. Presumably Qualcomm will expand its efforts for its most promising complaints in discovery to cover existing and future iPhones.
My suspicion is that Apple's recent handful of positions in modem engineering were not meant to design their own modem (as even older standards require hundreds of man years for a competitive implementation) but rather to engineer around Qualcomm's complaints. Apple is angling for more negative regulatory decisions as leverage before going to trial themselves against Qualcomm; Qualcomm wants to punish Apple's overreach in withholding all licensing fees (even non-disputed amounts) and force a settlement before this can happen.
the 670M is peanuts compared to the literal BILLIONS Apple refuses to pay QC for their FRAND patents (on communication protocols). There is no good guy in this war, only corporate greed on both sides, but QC has been more innovative than Apple in the phone market, and not getting paid for it.
I agree. Apple has tried to emphasize the exterior build and the human interfaces of the modern smartphone as the more important aspect of it, and they did indeed create the seminal, working implementations that inspired what all modern phones now use. However, the engineering expertise for the essential and much more difficult cellular data connectivity standards have largely been provided by Qualcomm, even though this aspect is much less appreciable to the public and largely behind the scenes.
Steve Jobs declared that Apple was planning to go "thermonuclear" on Android before he died, and I think their suit against Qualcomm is a much more essential component of this plan than their suit against Samsung given how easily Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8xx series enables Chinese OEMs to achieve feature parity with the iPhone; all they need to do is boot Android and most of them need not foot any of the substantial upfront R&D costs as Apple has to annually.
Apple is too proud to relinquish what now seems like a guiding value of their business in face of mounting legal pressure; I also believe Android phones will mostly fill the void that an iPhone ban will leave behind. The Chinese won't mind as their manufacturing facilities will likely make the same (low) margins creating Android handsets as iPhones, but their OEMs will collect much more of the profit up the value chain. Qualcomm should be only too happy to see this as it will be a full licensing payment to them as per their NDRC agreement from 2015 as well as a likely SoC sale as so many Chinese OEMs rely on Qualcomm's.
There is really no reason to expect this ban to have any big impact, banning phones in one country of the EU should not have a big impact, since you can get next day delivery from any number of other countries in the "one market". It will have an impact only on people who for some reason only buys from brick and mortar shops. Probably a small increase in sales of the newer iphones compared to what it would have been. I really doubt it's worth the risk/cost for Qc.
You're missing the bigger picture. A win here provides them with a much stronger negotiating position to deal with Apple on the global stage. Similarly, even a small dent in profits for Apple for following this suit might well lead to their entire legal strategy being questioned.
Don't forget the part that the phone is only banned for sale in 15 apple stores. All the models are free to sell in resellers or carriers, i.e. the ban is worthless and a big roflmao. Either ban the phone selling for real or don't, what's the point to ban it in 15 stores from 5 000? :)
The official order is that all legacy models being sold at German third parties need to be recalled although Apple isn't complying; they are similarly defying court orders in China barring sales. There will likely be stiff penalties for this defiance assessed against Apple. This is Qualcomm's retaliation for Apple ceasing all contractually owed licensing payments to them early in 2017. It is puzzling that Apple would do this as there is a non-disputed amount they both agree that Qualcomm is owed; Apple could have easily paid at least this amount and waited for the court to decide on the rest. One has to wonder if Apple did this in collusion with friendlier supplier Broadcom which initiated a failed hostile takeover earlier this year. Now that this bid failed, Apple is left holding the bag for their significant overreach in this overreach with multiple additional decisions likely to go in Qualcomm's favor in the coming months. Apple's remaining hope is to use negative regulatory rulings (that Apple instigated using false testimony) against Qualcomm to their favor in their coming trial versus Qualcomm.
Apple is making more and more of the chips it needs. Qualcomm can sue but Apple has deep pockets and win or lose. It will not matter. Intel is on notice with terrible CPU's for Apple laptops, 2 cores in basicly 2019.
Chips aren't at issue here, rather cellular interface patents are. These describe electromagnetic interfaces between phones and cellular towers that accommodate many users at once, address many difficult quality concerns like handoffs and reception quality, and are far more sophisticated than other patented interfaces such as GUI elements, software APIs, or x86 and ARM instruction sets upon which far bigger empires have been built upon. If you interface w/ 3G or 4G LTE (and 5G) cellular stations even without using Qualcomm's baseband implementations in the handset, you are using Qualcomm's patents and owe them a licensing fee. These are openly licensed and standard essential patents however and are encumbered by fair and non-discriminatory licensing requirements.
Apple alleges 2 things, namely that assessing royalties off of a capped percentage of the device wholesale unfairly eats into their innovations and that selling the modem should preclude Qualcomm from being able to assess a separate licensing fee as this exhausts the patents they are claiming. Both are absurd claims as the licensing structure is essentially a discount from a fixed fee for most OEMs (read Android) who typically have lower wholesale costs than Apple and make less intensive use of a standard than iPhones. Phones w/ lower res screens, cameras, and less storage don't have as high a data requirement on the infrastructure as ones w/ higher specs and such a licensing scheme is much more fair to the industry than a fixed fee. To say that patents expire on the sale of the implementing modem is equally absurd as claiming that once a harddrive is sold, no software licensing fee for software stored on that harddrive can be subsequently assessed. Costs to the public and the pace of improvements are far lower as a result than say with the closed x86 implementation environment which still only consists of Intel and AMD. Apple's main interest here is hobbling a key enabler of the Android ecosystem in Qualcomm, which does so through licensing discounts and providing the R&D intensive SoCs that achieve feature parity with Apple AX's year after year.
Correction: Costs to the public are lower and the pace of improvements are higher as a result than with a closed licensing scheme like x86 which still only consists of Intel and AMD with Intel maintaining 60% margins without nearly the pace of innovation as you would see in the ultramobile space. ...
Wow. So a chunk of their argument boils down to "we like our phones to be expensive and it's unfair that you want a larger cut because of that"? Very cute. I get that they must feel like they're subsidising the rest of the industry, but nobody forced them to price their phones the way they do.
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HStewart - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
I think it is important to note this is Germany, I believe EU is struggling so anything could help this struggle.I find it interest, iPhone X is not included - Apple would rather sell the more expensive models
darkswordsman17 - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
Is Germany struggling? Because that's where you'd actually need to think with that reasoning as this applies to Germany and not the EU.I don't think it has anything to do with what Apple wants. The X, and the XS/+ and XR, probably just don't infringe otherwise I'm sure Qualcomm would have had them banned as well.
Your thought process here seems completely skewed. This is just the corporate war waging between Apple and Qualcomm. Which it seems that Qualcomm did try to leverage their advantage in IP for awhile there and rubbed a lot of other companies the wrong way (Apple's not the first to have issues, and QC has been investigated for antitrust issues by the US and EU). I think Qualcomm saw what happened when Apple and Samsung had issues (Apple has shifted very strongly away from Samsung) and doesn't want to make it easy for them to do the same to them. This isn't going to change that (will actually almost certainly reinforce it), but I think Qualcomm is trying to get what they can while they can. If they could get the X and later I'm sure they would have.
frenchy_2001 - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
You are right, this is just one more step in the patent War Apple and QC are waging currently.Apple is engaging in reverse patent holdout ( https://academic.oup.com/jiplp/article-abstract/13... )
As most of QC patents are part of standards, they are subject to FRAND licensing. This means QC cannot get an injunction on their main patents (4G, 5G...). Apple has refused to pay their license fees for over a year now, so QC is trying to hurt them by using their non-FRAND patents and preventing sale to renegotiate their licenses.
(this is all a complicated contract and payment negotiation)
The probable reason the iphone X/XS/XR are not included is because the suit started before their release.
Spunjji - Monday, December 24, 2018 - link
You've made the mistake of trying to find a thread of logic in an HStewart post. Drive-by drivel is their stock in trade.Death666Angel - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
The fuck are you talking about?Zingam - Friday, December 21, 2018 - link
Oh, it is US that is struggling. So many wars and all of them lost. Military budget higher than ever and the costs irrecuperable. National debt growing.China is growing.
highlnder69 - Friday, December 21, 2018 - link
I'm not sure where you are getting your information about China growing, but I can say with 100% certainty that things aren't going well over there. Right now their economy is doing VERY badly. Because of the tariff battle, people in China right now are unable to purchase pork. Since they imposed tariff's on our pork imports, and them having issues with diseased pigs, which they are having to kill and bury, prices of all other meat has increased substantially, all while the value of their currency keeps getting devalued. The housing market, especially in Beijing, is very bad. BTW, I know first hand because my wife's parents live in Beijing and told us about it. Don't believe what you keep hearing on the news.sonny73n - Saturday, December 22, 2018 - link
“I know first hand because my wife's parents live in Beijing and told us about it.”I wouldn’t call it “first hand”. What you’d heard is a bunch of bs from an old couple who tried to get some sympathy ($$$) from you.
I don’t know where he gets his info but I know where you get yours, which is from some old nags.
Spunjji - Monday, December 24, 2018 - link
Do you realize that all of these things are possible simultaneously? GDP growth doesn't always mean better conditions for ordinary people. See the USA and UK post-1980s for a vivid demonstration of that.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
Actually, this injunction also affects the iPhone X, but not the three newest models. It'll be interesting if QC ends up posting the bond. €668.4 million is about QC's net profit for an entire quarter. There is significant risk in doing so: If the court ends up deciding against them, that bond money would be used to compensate Apple for lost revenue. Apple is initially in a lower risk situation here: by removing the iPhone 7, 8 and 1st generation X from their lineup in Germany, anybody who wants a reasonably current new iPhone is now stuck with their three newest and priciest models. On the other hand, if Apple looses this lawsuit and the inevitable appeals, QC could get a princely sum for damages.Lastly, the presiding judge made an interesting comment on why the court granted the injunction: While Apple/Qorvo stated that their envelope tracking chip is so different from QC's technology that it doesn't violate QC's patents. However, Apple and Qorvo refused to provide details on their envelope tracking tech, making it impossible for the court to judge the merit of QC's infringement claim at this stage, hence the injunction.
Basically, Apple/Qorvo simply say their solution is so different that QC's patents don't apply, but have so far refused to tell the court how their supposedly different solution works. This will be interesting.
Raqia - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
Good post. There are multiple other non-essential patent claims still in the pipeline in multiple jurisdictions should this one not stick; before the US ITC, only one out of six patents were ultimately found to be infringed by Apple but this is sufficient to grant an injunction. Presumably Qualcomm will expand its efforts for its most promising complaints in discovery to cover existing and future iPhones.My suspicion is that Apple's recent handful of positions in modem engineering were not meant to design their own modem (as even older standards require hundreds of man years for a competitive implementation) but rather to engineer around Qualcomm's complaints. Apple is angling for more negative regulatory decisions as leverage before going to trial themselves against Qualcomm; Qualcomm wants to punish Apple's overreach in withholding all licensing fees (even non-disputed amounts) and force a settlement before this can happen.
frenchy_2001 - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
the 670M is peanuts compared to the literal BILLIONS Apple refuses to pay QC for their FRAND patents (on communication protocols).There is no good guy in this war, only corporate greed on both sides, but QC has been more innovative than Apple in the phone market, and not getting paid for it.
Raqia - Thursday, December 20, 2018 - link
I agree. Apple has tried to emphasize the exterior build and the human interfaces of the modern smartphone as the more important aspect of it, and they did indeed create the seminal, working implementations that inspired what all modern phones now use. However, the engineering expertise for the essential and much more difficult cellular data connectivity standards have largely been provided by Qualcomm, even though this aspect is much less appreciable to the public and largely behind the scenes.Steve Jobs declared that Apple was planning to go "thermonuclear" on Android before he died, and I think their suit against Qualcomm is a much more essential component of this plan than their suit against Samsung given how easily Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8xx series enables Chinese OEMs to achieve feature parity with the iPhone; all they need to do is boot Android and most of them need not foot any of the substantial upfront R&D costs as Apple has to annually.
Apple is too proud to relinquish what now seems like a guiding value of their business in face of mounting legal pressure; I also believe Android phones will mostly fill the void that an iPhone ban will leave behind. The Chinese won't mind as their manufacturing facilities will likely make the same (low) margins creating Android handsets as iPhones, but their OEMs will collect much more of the profit up the value chain. Qualcomm should be only too happy to see this as it will be a full licensing payment to them as per their NDRC agreement from 2015 as well as a likely SoC sale as so many Chinese OEMs rely on Qualcomm's.
Zoolook13 - Friday, December 21, 2018 - link
There is really no reason to expect this ban to have any big impact, banning phones in one country of the EU should not have a big impact, since you can get next day delivery from any number of other countries in the "one market".It will have an impact only on people who for some reason only buys from brick and mortar shops.
Probably a small increase in sales of the newer iphones compared to what it would have been.
I really doubt it's worth the risk/cost for Qc.
Spunjji - Monday, December 24, 2018 - link
You're missing the bigger picture. A win here provides them with a much stronger negotiating position to deal with Apple on the global stage. Similarly, even a small dent in profits for Apple for following this suit might well lead to their entire legal strategy being questioned.Spunjji - Monday, December 24, 2018 - link
Thanks for the additional info. Standard shady behaviour from all parties so far, as expected!cha0z_ - Thursday, December 27, 2018 - link
Don't forget the part that the phone is only banned for sale in 15 apple stores. All the models are free to sell in resellers or carriers, i.e. the ban is worthless and a big roflmao. Either ban the phone selling for real or don't, what's the point to ban it in 15 stores from 5 000? :)Raqia - Thursday, December 27, 2018 - link
The official order is that all legacy models being sold at German third parties need to be recalled although Apple isn't complying; they are similarly defying court orders in China barring sales. There will likely be stiff penalties for this defiance assessed against Apple. This is Qualcomm's retaliation for Apple ceasing all contractually owed licensing payments to them early in 2017. It is puzzling that Apple would do this as there is a non-disputed amount they both agree that Qualcomm is owed; Apple could have easily paid at least this amount and waited for the court to decide on the rest. One has to wonder if Apple did this in collusion with friendlier supplier Broadcom which initiated a failed hostile takeover earlier this year. Now that this bid failed, Apple is left holding the bag for their significant overreach in this overreach with multiple additional decisions likely to go in Qualcomm's favor in the coming months. Apple's remaining hope is to use negative regulatory rulings (that Apple instigated using false testimony) against Qualcomm to their favor in their coming trial versus Qualcomm.Rukur - Friday, December 21, 2018 - link
Apple is making more and more of the chips it needs. Qualcomm can sue but Apple has deep pockets and win or lose. It will not matter.Intel is on notice with terrible CPU's for Apple laptops, 2 cores in basicly 2019.
Raqia - Sunday, December 23, 2018 - link
Chips aren't at issue here, rather cellular interface patents are. These describe electromagnetic interfaces between phones and cellular towers that accommodate many users at once, address many difficult quality concerns like handoffs and reception quality, and are far more sophisticated than other patented interfaces such as GUI elements, software APIs, or x86 and ARM instruction sets upon which far bigger empires have been built upon. If you interface w/ 3G or 4G LTE (and 5G) cellular stations even without using Qualcomm's baseband implementations in the handset, you are using Qualcomm's patents and owe them a licensing fee. These are openly licensed and standard essential patents however and are encumbered by fair and non-discriminatory licensing requirements.Apple alleges 2 things, namely that assessing royalties off of a capped percentage of the device wholesale unfairly eats into their innovations and that selling the modem should preclude Qualcomm from being able to assess a separate licensing fee as this exhausts the patents they are claiming. Both are absurd claims as the licensing structure is essentially a discount from a fixed fee for most OEMs (read Android) who typically have lower wholesale costs than Apple and make less intensive use of a standard than iPhones. Phones w/ lower res screens, cameras, and less storage don't have as high a data requirement on the infrastructure as ones w/ higher specs and such a licensing scheme is much more fair to the industry than a fixed fee. To say that patents expire on the sale of the implementing modem is equally absurd as claiming that once a harddrive is sold, no software licensing fee for software stored on that harddrive can be subsequently assessed. Costs to the public and the pace of improvements are far lower as a result than say with the closed x86 implementation environment which still only consists of Intel and AMD. Apple's main interest here is hobbling a key enabler of the Android ecosystem in Qualcomm, which does so through licensing discounts and providing the R&D intensive SoCs that achieve feature parity with Apple AX's year after year.
Raqia - Sunday, December 23, 2018 - link
Correction: Costs to the public are lower and the pace of improvements are higher as a result than with a closed licensing scheme like x86 which still only consists of Intel and AMD with Intel maintaining 60% margins without nearly the pace of innovation as you would see in the ultramobile space. ...Spunjji - Monday, December 24, 2018 - link
Wow. So a chunk of their argument boils down to "we like our phones to be expensive and it's unfair that you want a larger cut because of that"? Very cute. I get that they must feel like they're subsidising the rest of the industry, but nobody forced them to price their phones the way they do.